Making a long story short, I managed to salvage some computer parts from a garbage pile, and i'm currently playing around with things. What i'm currently trying to do is turn the two CPU fans I got into some battery powered fans. The problem seems to be the fans siezing upon me, refusing to move. Had a prior problem along these lines with a motor I "salvage" from a PoS, outdated fax/printer/scanner/combo device. Using a 12v battery that you would find for a starter motor in a go kart, know it's 12vs but not sure about what would be "normally" used for, and it doesn't want to spin up. The little 9v battery I tried out doesn't seem to work either. Tried the tricks online, hooking up a switch button I got from a broken food processor and using that, but it doesn't work either.

The magnets that drive the motor seem to be all turned on, instead of working in series to drive the motor. At least, I "think" that might be the problem since I feel resistance when I push on the motor.

Both fans that I salvaged have 3 cords with 1 red, 1 black, 1 blue/white. The red is positive and the black is negative from what i've understood so far. Also, before anyone asks, NO! I am not turning these into USB things since my electrical skills, like the rest of my skills, are pretty much crap. Refuse to hook anything up to a device that plugs into an outlet after I popped the circuit breaker when I tried to re-wire a mixer to "fix it." (Was 10 or 11 at the time and never got a person to watch over me again, so yea....)

the motor may be an AC (Alternating current) motor & may not work with the DC (Direct current) output of the battery even though the voltage may be same without a converter

If you're feeling resistance of any decent amount, the motor is seized. The relatively weak magnetic force would be easily overcomable.

Computer components are all DC.

Fans for PCs are usually a Stepper Motor and require DC pulses to operate. You can get a stepper motor controller at radio shack that will give you the pulses that you need.

I think that might be the case since I tapped the negative line to the negative terminal of the battery and it seemed to have little problems spinning up. It really perplexes me that I see these videos on youtube of people hooking up batteries to these fans and get them to work without a problem, more annoying than perplexing I guess now.