So, I recently picked up a couple older Gateway 2000s for what I thought was a fairly reasonable price. They're a P5-133 with a VX chipset and a 486sx-25 in the desktop configuration (I have always loved those earlier Gateway cases with the curved fronts-- never had one). I was a little worried because the seller said he didn't test them. They'd been in his basement for a while and he was worried about PSU failure. They were in town, and the price was low enough that I risked it.

The bad news is that the 486 had a nicad barrel battery that had leaked a little. I snipped it out, cleaned up the board, and booted it up and it mostly worked. The old hard drive was probably about 20% functional in that it booted to windows 98 (On a 486SX... masochists...), but the drive was knocking and throwing errors. At some point, grandpa had added a 4.5v alkaline battery pack, which had also died. This is making any progress really difficult because it keeps forgetting the HD settings every time I cycle the power. I did finally find a SD-IDE adapter that works in it (it even recognized a 2gb SD card!), but when it resets, it defaults to a different HD type and fails to find the drive. So, yeah, I need a battery.

TL;DR: I have some CR2032 wired holders and was just going to solder one onto the lead for the alkline pack and go from there (for now). The board works, but the light corrosion around the area where the barrel battery was makes me a little nervous about soldering anything in there. Since the old battery was 3.6v, the alkaline was 4.5v... it seems like it can tolerate a range of voltages, would 3.3 be an issue?

This is kind of fun-- it's my first real 486. I went from an 8086 to a 386sx to a Pentium (I apparently like to skip even generations). I'd been underclocking and throttling a P2 on a BX board for my retro gaming needs, but I'm glad to have a Socket 7 board again. Maybe I'll even use the 486 and not resell it. We'll see! Kinda geeking out... sorry for the round-about route on a simple question.