Pulling the CMOS battery will not clear a modern Acer BIOS password
It used to work, on a different kind of machine. On a modern Acer it resets the clock and nothing else, because the password survives a full discharge.
By Fawaz, who runs Outsyde.
The advice that used to be true
If you search for a way past a BIOS password, you will find the same answer within the first three results: open the machine, take out the coin cell on the board, wait, put it back. It is not a scam and it is not folklore. It is real advice that used to work, and the people repeating it are not lying to you.
On desktop PCs of the 1990s and early 2000s, the BIOS kept its settings in a small block of memory that only held its contents while it had power. A coin cell on the motherboard supplied that power when the machine was unplugged, which is also how the clock kept time with the power off. That block was where the setup password went. Cut the power to it for long enough and the contents were simply gone, password included, along with your boot order and your date and time. That is the whole trick. It worked because the thing you wanted erased was sitting in memory that could not survive without a battery.
It was well enough known that boards shipped with a jumper to do the same job without the disassembly, which is the other half of the advice you will have found: short these two pins, clear the settings. Same idea, same reason it worked.
Why it stopped working on a modern Acer
The design moved on. On the machines we work on, an Intel Acer laptop running InsydeH2O firmware, the password is not held in that volatile, battery backed memory any more. It is kept somewhere that does not need power to remember, which means a full discharge has nothing to take away from it.
That is as specific as we are going to be, here and everywhere else on this site. Where it actually lives and how it is checked is the part that took the research, and publishing it would shorten someone else's. What matters to you is the consequence, not the address: there is no length of time with the coin cell out, no combination of holding the power button, and no jumper on the board, that gets you back to an unlocked F2 screen.
Worth being precise about one thing, because the internet is not. We are not saying the coin cell trick never worked on anything with an Acer badge on it. Plenty of older Acer machines behaved like every other machine of their era, and on some of them it did exactly what the guides say. The claim is narrower and it is the one that affects you: on the generation of Acer laptops this service covers, it does nothing to the password.
What people actually see when they try it
This is the most common thing a customer has already done before they contact us. Far more common than trying a generator, and it usually costs more, because a generator costs an afternoon and this costs a disassembled laptop.
The pattern is the same almost every time. They find the guide, and it is a good guide, carefully written. They get the bottom cover off, which on a modern laptop means a dozen screws of three different lengths and a row of clips that flex further than feels safe. They find the cell, disconnect the main battery properly first, and leave it out for an hour, or overnight, because one of the comments said an hour was not enough. They put it all back together.
Then they power on, and the machine asks them to set the date and time. That is the moment that reads as success, and it is not. The clock resetting is proof that the coin cell was doing its job and that you have genuinely interrupted it. Some BIOS settings will have gone back to defaults too. Then they press F2, and the password prompt is there, and it is the same password.
What they are left with is a laptop that has been opened, a warranty that has been affected, and the problem they started with. Nobody did anything wrong. The advice was just written for a different machine.
What still works
The password is still recoverable. It is just not recoverable by removing power, because removing power was never what a modern machine is vulnerable to.
If your Acer wrote out a code.txt after three wrong attempts,
what that file is explains why no generator can solve
it, and remote recovery is the route that does work.
Attaching the report from our tool tells you whether your laptop is one we can
do, with no charge and no commitment either way.
Whatever you do next, leave the screws in. This particular trick is not worth the teardown.