I kind of got used to the fact that vintage secondhand motherboards often came without CMOS battery that's been removed due to leaking.

However, I now noticed that people started to replace them with simple CR2032 lithium coin battery holders!

Not only it looks ugly, simply because you need a slightly different surface area for the holder compared to the original battery and the holder not always fits blocking access to slots or mounting mb in the case. However, it is also dangerous as 386/486 era motherboards were designed to work with rechargeable batteries. So basically such a simple replacement mod leads to non-rechargeable battery being charged. In extreme case this could even lead to a fire.

So it is important to reiterate that the charging circuit need do be changed to in such a mod (either to remove charging voltage) or install a diode to restrict current from battery to the MB only.

I was wondering what's everybody preferred method for dealing with this? I've seen some mini PCBs with battery holder and diod but these IMHO don't look right and often don't fit as CR2032 battery holder has different shape than the original battery and not always there is enough space around.

More I think about this more I incline to just soldering back a fresh NI-MH which should give it a decade life (before it needs to be replaced again). But It best preserves the original look. Or just to remove it and use external battery pin header?