Macintosh II & IIx replacement battery holders

[wottle]

I've been wondering, in the official battery upgrade from apple, the batteries are situated on a little riser board, and there is a capacitor installed as well. What is the purpose of that capacitor? It's not present on the original logic board, so obviously some in engineering thought it would help somehow.

I did notice that on a second Mac II I ended up getting. The odd thing is that Apple didn’t continue that on the IIfx. If it was that important, it feels like they would have changed it going forward.

A side note on my machine that was having issues, I ended up selling recently but before I sold it I was able to get it to reliably boot using very well charged aaa batteries in a 3 x AAA battery holder. I was probably using 1/2 AA batteries that were a bit low and it did not like it.

 

[lilliputian]

That's great to hear that there is an alternative to the Safts!

As for the riser board, the II and IIx had the batteries next to each other, wheras on the IIfx, they're far separated. I wonder if that had something to do with it.

 

[Branchus]

I've been wondering, in the official battery upgrade from apple, the batteries are situated on a little riser board, and there is a capacitor installed as well. What is the purpose of that capacitor? It's not present on the original logic board, so obviously some in engineering thought it would help somehow.

I think the party line is that the capacitor powers the PRAM for a small amount of time then the batteries are removed and replaced without losing the settings.