Changing the Battery on Your Motherboard
June 8th, 2008 at 7:24 pm (Computers)
I’d noticed recently that astra (my ancient Ubuntu machine) was getting forgetful; she couldn’t remember what time it was when booting up. Almost certainly, the battery on her motherboard had finally run out (I bought astra in 2000). The first hit on google was this great article on battery replacement; astra turned out to have the “lateral socket” type of lithium battery.
Here’s what the computer looked like when I opened it up. Can you spot the battery?
That’s right, it’s under the video card!
Popping it out was as easy as the above link suggested, and then I went to Radio Shack and bought a replacement ($4.99). I booted up and told astra to sync with a network time server (yep, my Ubuntu wireless card installation continues to work). You can imagine how pleased I was with the easy fix, until I rebooted the machine and it failed to find the primary master hard drive. Guess how far you get without one of those?
I re-opened the case and checked the seating on all of my drive cables (I have it stuffed full with a floppy drive, two CD drives, and two hard drives), which possibly had come loose between boots? Nothing felt loose, but the next reboot was successful. And the time was right! Whew!
What to do with the old battery? Rechargeable batteries can be recycled (you can search for a local dropoff site), and California regulations require that all batteries be recycled (they are categorized as hazardous waste). Conveniently, there’s a pickup for batteries at my workplace. Otherwise, the preceding link has suggestions for other ways to get rid of your old batteries.
Katie said,
July 21, 2008 at 10:49 am
Hi, Kiri. There was no place for comments on your ‘about’ page, so I am putting it here. I think this is a fabulous idea for a ‘blog…keeping track of things learned and things experienced. Thanks for sharing your experiences!