My Precision 7670, just as I was about to upload a production-ready app suddenly turned off. Gone, fully off. A few minutes later it came back to life but stopped at UEFI, saying timec& date weren't set. The power light was flashing orange, 6 white. Which is Dell's way of telling you that your CMOS battery needs a refresh. No problem, this won't take long.

Oh yes it will. I've never come across such bone-headed design. To get to the wee battery, the process is:

1. Remove base (6 screws)
2. Remove battery (4 screws)
3. Remove CAMM module (4 screws)
4. Remove both NVMe (3 screws)
5. Remove cooling system (12 screws)
6. Remove inner frame (15 screws)
7. Remove system board (18 connectors + 16 screws)

& then you get to flip the board over to disconnect the CMOS battery. In all my time with computers, I have never come across such ridiculous design. Especially when the UEFI doesn't let the laptop operate with an out of spec CMOS battery, so you can't just reset the date & carry on, hell no. Give it a minute or two & it's shutdown time again.

This is easily a 2 hour job to replace a $5(?) battery. This is the last of the Precision workstations, Dell replaced the range with the confusingly named Dell Pro Max range. I'm picking that they have a 17" version & as they do name their laptops by screen size, that there is a Dell 17 Pro Max available. (Speculation, I'm not going to bother making sure that they are, in fact, so stupid.)

Anyway, rant over, I have a job to get back to. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.