Bob,

You're not likely to do any damage, serious or otherwise, when replacing
the battery providing you just replace the battery and don't go diving in
and pulling wires off connectors and the like. In other words, be
sensible and when you're finished check that the various connectors
between the motherboard and your external devices such as hard drive,
floppy (if installed) and CD & DVD etc, are still securely in place.

What will most likely happen is that the bios will reset to its default
settings meaning that any specific configuration or settings that you
might have made will probably be lost as these are stored in volatile
memory which will clear down when the battery is removed. If you haven't
made any changes then all should be well, if you have, such as perhaps
customising the boot order, you will need to reapply those changes.

Best of luck.
--
Mike Maltby
MS-MVP Windows



Bob Reynolds wrote:

Lost a few hours when switched off over-night, the machine is about 4
years old, do you think replacing the battery when I find the model
should be straigh-forward, or am I at risk of doing serious damage?
Thanks Again.