Powerbook G4 PRAM battery

i'm working on my friend's powerbook G4 that has been acting up on him. First thing I notice when turning it on is that the date and time is set to sometime in the 1970's. My first thought is that the PRAM battery is dead since he said he bought it from a guy who had it sitting around and never used it. I tried to reset the time to see if it would stay the same but it has a password on it and the guy my friend bought it from doesn't remember the password (he is using a guest account). Does anyone know of another way that I could test that the PRAM is the actual problem here without opening the machine up and switching it? Any help would be appreciated.

If the date is regularly going back to the 1970s, then you can be pretty sure that the PRAM battery is caput, especially in a machine over 4-5 years old

yeah that is the main symptom but I am not able to change the time because of the admin password that we don't have, so I actually haven't seen it reset the time/date.

Hope you got the system install disc with the PowerBook to change the password and for trouble shooting.

Change the backup battery. Check the Apple website for details (i'm not sure how to do it on a powerbook)

manymanymacs: yeah I found a couple tutorials on it

harryb2448: Your post brings up another question... we have changed the original OS to Leopard 10.5.6 so is that the disk I will use now to diagnose the system? I tried to boot to diagnostics with the OS X disks and was unable... I also booted and held "option" to give me the boot options and all I have is the HD and the OS disk there is no option for diagnostics... any ideas?