



When I build a system I always put a new battery on the motherboard because you’ve got no idea how long that may have been sitting on a shelf in the warehouse the battery draining the whole time. Most machines use a big hearing aid battery and they generally can be depended upon to last about three years. All current PC and I believe Apple as well use a battery to backup a small amount of information (in volatile RAM) that the system needs in order to start (aka CMOS). For those having issues after booting from (cold=machine off) there may be another consideration.
