Alright, I opened the sucker up. First of all, it's a type 2722, w/ a 14" display. Sorry for omitting that information before.
The CMOS battery is indeed there, wrapped in black rubber (or rubber-like plastic), under the keyboard, next to the keyboard and touchpad connectors. I suppose I'll see about replacing it, it ain't a standard one. While I haven't removed them, I also got a closer look at the PCMCIA/ATA slots. They are indeed as I described, though they *appear* to be connected to the same bus. It's small work so I might be wrong, though. I've decided to just nuke the hdd contents (minus the system partition, for now). Installing OpenBSD is more important =) --schaafuit.