Hi, Im thinking I might have a dead cmos battery but would like to double check.

The machine in question is an IBM PS/2 8580-A31.

The battery is attatched to the speaker. From the mainboard there are four wires, 2red & 2black (makes sence).
One red goes straight to the battery's possitive terminal. The other red goes straight to the speakers positive terminal.
One black goes to the speakers negative terminal, and then to the batterys negative terminal. the other black goes no-where, it just has abit of heatshrink on the end.

Is this how it should be wired? It seams abit odd to share an earth when theres a spare.

Any help either sorting the wiring or replacing the battery (P/N 72X8498)

Cheers

That is an unusual setup. At first I thought it might have been some sort of modification, such as a tamper alarm using battery power. But I found a photo on google which shows a battery located with the speaker. It might be worth having a further look at the motherboard as the CMOS battery might still be separate.

If you do replace this battery, it's probably best to wire it the same way. The engineers who designed it must have had a reason. Alternatively, the wiring may have been a mod to overcome another problem.

Yeah its odd. Ive had it stripped down to just the mainboard today and couldn't see anything that looked like a battery. But to be honest, unless it was the round watch type battery used on todays machines, I probabbly wouldn't notice it..

Ill have another look

It might be incorporated in with the real time clock. If it's one of those, you might be forced to consider the worth of the computer. Or live with setting it up every time you power on.

Well Ive just stripped it down again, and Ive made a discovery... I need to get out more!

Anyway, No other obvious batterys in there. The one on the speaker is 6v, so I might just bodge something together out of 4 1.5v AAA's n see if that works.

Rimfire (worrying name!) Is there anyway of knowing if the battery is incorporated into the clock?

Cheers People, If I cant fix it then Ill continue selling it as is. I just thought adding a "Everything is fixed" message to the listing would kick start things abit.

It's only meant to frighten you a little ;-)

The RTCs that incorporated a battery were a fairly large black block of plastic. The most common ones were the Dallas 1685 and 1687. If you locate the device, then you'll need to check the specs of the component.

Well. Ive put everything back together, set the time and Im getting no more battery error codes.!!!

Oh Well, one last question and it isnt really hardware but can anyone point me in the right direction of an "information disk" for a "3com ehterlink/mc" adaptor?

You want drivers for a network card?

You could try one of these

Cheers mate but it was the adf file I needed. I found it on the web and I NOW HAVE NO ERROR CODES

Wahoo << Far too excited!

Cheers Guys (Its on Ebay by the way <just a small plug!>)