Hello Everyone,
Thanks for the comments, please keep them coming!
Well, some progress, now the current draw is only about 110uA, better, but still too much!
I did disassemble the laptop, and most of the backup battery circuits were at place on the motherboard that did not get water damaged.
There was only a narrow "band" (~1/2") at the bottom of the PCB where I could see that it was under water. I cleaned it with IPA.
BTW, the water damage happened about two years ago, so I think the innards were as dry as they could get.
Well it was not that simple.
Measuring resistances, at the common point of the two Shottky diodes (D3, D6) the resistance to the ground was about 10 kOhm before cleaning. I did remove D6 and C287 (big mistake) as I suspected those components, but nothing changed.
That was when I searched in the pdf schematics for the word "RTCVCC", and it went to another IC that was not installed on the mobo, but was located in the water damaged area. And there was crud.
I cleaned it, and now the same resistance reads about 1.1 MOhm.
Removing those components was a mistake in hind-sight, the diode disappeared, the cap got damaged.
I did get new components and installed them, it was quite a pain!
Resistance is still 1.1 MOhm, but the current draw is still 110uA, which is about 100 days for a 230mAh back-up battery.
This was measured on the bare board, as removed from the PC, everything disconnected from it.
The real time clock is in an Intel hub-chip (ICH9M), and as the mobo is still disconnected and unpowered, none of the registers are initialized.
A quick look at the hub datasheet (close to 900 pages!) lists the real time clock as using 6uA!
I am still trying to reconcile all this info, and wondering if the board being "bare" has any bearing on the backup battery current draw.
I am wondering if I should put the laptop together, or still look for some other things as well.
Any comment would be appreciated!
Thanks, Peter