change battery

[Guest]

<BR>Have 89 reatta with 39,000 miles. Need a new battery. Can anyone t6ell me if disconnecting the battery will have an effect on the crt when reconnected. Thank you

[ply33]

The engineers in Detroit are not idiots. They know that replacing a battery is a standard procedure done by high school drop outs at the local shop. Any device that really needs to remember things writes it into non-volative storage when the event occurs. (Typical late 80s to early 90s EEPROM has 100s of thousands of write cycles before it goes bad.) Everything else is reset to factory defaults.<P>At least that was true of my '82 Plymouth and is true of my '91 Jeep.<P>As Model A Hal mentioned, depending on your car, you have you <span style="font-style: italic">may</span> have to reset the radio station buttons and you <span style="font-style: italic">may</span> have to reset the clock.

[Dave@Moon]

If you go down to your local parts store, they'll sell you a little device that hooks a 9V transistor radio battery into the cigarette lighter. Do this before you disconnect the old battery (& leave it in place until you're done w/ the new one) and you'll be able to save all your radio stations and clock settings.<P>At least in theory! I've tried to use mine 3 times and it has <I> never </I> worked!

[Guest Hal Davis (MODEL A HAL)]

Do you mean the computer? <P>Disconnecting the battery will likely erase any codes that the on board computer has stored, if any. If the computer has detected a problem with your engine and stored a code, you would have a "check engine" light lit on the instrument panel. If the problem still exists after you reconnect the battery, the computer will store the code again the next time it encounters the problem so don't worry about losing it. It may also lose any info it has stored regarding your driving habits, but again, don't worry. It will re-learn how you drive.<P>The only other thing I can think of is that you'll have to reset your clock and radio stations.