The laser itself works fine, but the module includes a chip with integrated battery. The battery has long since gone dead. This is a questionable design decision.
I have dealt with exactly this sort of thing with the infamous Sun Microsystems NVRAM. The chips themselves are out of production. You can find old stock, but of course the battery itself has a shelf life, so it is not clear that buying "new old stock" is a real solution. What people do is to perform some surgery and glue a coin cell socket piggyback on these chips.
The chip used in the DXR is a Dallas DS1994L-F5. It looks like a small fat coin cell. Inside is (no doubt) a coin cell battery internally connection to a static RAM plus clock chip.
Tom's Mineralogy Info / tom@mmto.org