Dredging up an old thread:

They initially brought me a laptop to dork with, except it turned out that the laptop was super-customized to run some kind of video editing system. It had a custom funky-colored keyboard. It was configured to run on their internal network. It had an station property tag glued to it. Clearly, no good.

Finally, the TV people came back, this time with a 2000-vintage P4 desktop (733MHz). The tech at the station had pretty much wiped the machine clean, setting up an easy cover story. ("I got this as a hand-me-down from work, but it's not working right. Can you fix it?") Conveniently, the motherboard battery was already dead, providing a nice easy test. The TV people wanted something easy to replicate (read: low-impact), so they'd already concluded that they didn't want to monkey around with viruses and worms or anything like that. Instead, they just wanted to wiggle out the hard drive's IDE cable.

This particular box, since it was at some point meant to be a fancy corporate desktop, has some nice BIOS features. It actually complains about the battery and the lack of an IDE drive before it will let the thing boot. Sounds to me like it's practically a gimme for the fixit shops, but it should work.