On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 22:48 +0100, Phil wrote:
One generic beige tower, P2, MMX board, wouldn't guess how old but does have on board USB and an ethernet card, keyboard, Microshaft mouse and a Compaq 17" tube. All free. The tube is good, I just have no space, and need it all to go. The hard drive did have SuSe 9.0 on it last time it was booted, comes up with CMOS error now - I'm a PPC/Mac kinda guy and the wonders of BIOS leave me cold...
Nothing to worry about it's just the usual non-intuitive PC BIOS error telling you that the CMOS battery is flat.
Usually this is a standard CR2032 3v coin cell, unless it is REALLY old in which case it may be a harder to obtain Dallas clock module (which has an integrated battery, easy to spot it is a socketed chip that is a lot fatter than normal usually situated on one of the corners of the Mainboard)
It's worth mentioning that in extreme cases the obsolete versions of Dallas modules can be fixed by carefully hacking off the cap, the double height plastic houses a standard size DIL chip and a "cap" that contains the battery...if you carefully break off the cap you can access the battery (mounted on little solder tags) and replace it...There are other makes of a similar device (Houston Tech, Benchmarq and Odin) although I haven't tried to modify them.