dosdude1

The Macintosh SE I acquired about 2 years ago seems to be having intermittent issues, that seem to have gotten worse since I've owned the machine. Basically, sometimes when the machine is powered up, it doesn't chime and instantly throws a Sad Mac error. Other times, the Sad Mac will appear randomly while the machine is running. My best guess to the cause of this issue would be bad solder joints on the logic board (as slightly jolting the machine seems to make it work again), but I'm not really sure. Bad contact with RAM could also be a problem, as the contacts look to be of questionable integ

The photo of the Varta battery posted above is from my Macintosh SE. Although the battery was still working fine, I removed it, just to avoid any chance of leakage. The best solution I've found is to solder a CR2032 battery holder in it's place, allowing for easy future battery replacement, and pretty much eliminate any chance of leakage. So far (it's been about 3 or 4 months), the CR2032 3V battery has proven to work fine in my Macintosh SE. Not sure if it's a suitable replacement for later Macs that use removable 3.6V batteries, but I'd say it would be worth a try.

I just thought I'd start a post detailing a very cheap PRAM battery modification I've done to my Macintosh SE, using a CR2032 battery. This is an original, 800K only Macintosh SE (pre-FDHD/SuperDrive), so it uses a soldered on Varta 3V 1/2 AA size Lithium battery (The FDHD/SuperDrive models use a socketed, 3.6V 1/2 AA size battery, I believe). First off, I went looking around for a CR2032 battery holder that looked like it would fit nicely on the Macintosh SE's logic board, in the place where the original battery was. The most suitable one I could find was actually from RadioShack, only costin