That's not the only problem with it, of course. I'm not sure where he was keeping it, but it was in need of a good clean. It also gave an awful beep when turned on. The beep was caused by a failing CMOS battery.
This week, I set about restoring it. The first task was replacing the CMOS battery. I watched a brief tear-down video. I usually watch these sorts of videos at 2x speed, but this was particularly quick because there are only 9 screws to loosen on the 6th gen X1 Carbon. 5 for the bottom of the shell, and 4 for the battery.
The CMOS battery was wrapped in this bright plastic, but after "unwrapping" it; I discovered it was a 2016 battery. As a side note: this is the same type of battery I was searching for when replacing Gameboy DMG cartridge batteries a while back. This time I found a pack at the local grocer.
I'm always hesitant to do this, but you can actually just solder straight to a battery. Prolonged, intense heat isn't good; but just enough to attach a lead is fine. I reused the leads from the old battery. The next time I set the BIOS time was also the last time I heard that beep.
I'd already passed the battery to get to the CMOS battery; so that wasn't going to be a problem to replace. I found one for approximately $50 on a local marketplace site. They delivered in 2 days.
Anyway...This 7 year old laptop, which my friend was chucking out, is now the machine I'm writing this on. I love making dead things alive, and I'm going to force myself to spend time on this machine until I can make an informed decision as to whether or not I still need to work on a Mac.
These integrated graphics aren't going to help much for gaming, but the i7 CPU + 16GB RAM should be more than enough for coding and game dev.