Don Bruder ) writes:

I'm not absolutely certain on that myself, though many explanations have
been put forth over the years, with the one I think is probably "the
real situation" being that Macs (A) Don't cut the battery out of the
circuit when powered up and (B) the battery isn't just keeping the RTC
running, but also keeping a chunk of memory (which we call "PRAM" here
in Mac-land - holds various fairly-to-really critical information) alive.


That second means nothing in itself. "IBM PC" type computers have a tiny
bit of static RAM to hold the bios settings. If it wasn't there, and kept
alive, you'd always have to set those things every time you turn the computer
on.

Now, it may be that one uses more current than the other, but I can't
really see that being a significant difference.

Michael