Battry inside powermac?

[AoWolf]

My youth paster just bought a 466 mhz powermac for his son on ebay. He had it sent to me because I am the person who brought him to the mac platform and I have some ram to install into it. Naturally the fist thing I did when I got it was to open it up to make sure that all was well besides a poor job of reinstalling the the optical and zip drive it all looked good, that was until I saw that little battery(you know the purple one that looks like a mini AA). It had fallen out of its compartment and was on the rolling around on the inside. The small place where it would click in was also broken on side (both of the metallic pieces where there and the plastic thing but on of the pieces had broken off. I need to know 2 things.

1. What did the battery do?

2. Is it worth even starting the computer up or would that make it worse.

 

[musicpyrite]

Thats called a CMOS battery. It's usually used to keep track of the time, so when your computer starts up, it knows the year, day, and hour.

They aren't very expensive or hard to replace, maybe $5 and some scotch tape will fix it.

More info on CMOS batteries

 

[AoWolf]

Ah ok thats good to know.

 

[Makosuke]

2. Is it worth even starting the computer up or would that make it worse.

The computer will usually run fine (save not knowing the time and often taking a while to find the startup drive and/or having the wrong resolution at start up.

That said, bad batteries (or no battery in your case) can cause flaky behavior on a Mac, depending on the model and your luck. It won't break anything, but I've even seen some old Macs completely fail to find the hard drive and start up, though I think that's not an issue any more.