computer battery story

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The clock on my old HP Workstation was getting funny, loosing time, wouldn't hold the correct time, etc. After a bit of investigating, I came to realize the ~10 year old battery was probably shot.

So I found a technical manual just to determine the battery number, it's one of those lithium coin cells. Curiously, the battery replacement instructions included a caution that the system settings should be backed up on a floppy before removing the battery.

So I dug out some old 3.5" floppies and put them in the computer just to check things. The floppy drives haven't been used in ~5 years. At first I got an error and then the same error on another computer of the same vintage, but after a bit of fidgeting with it, the floppy drives seemed to come to life and start working. So then I saved the system settings.

After replacing the battery, the computer seemed to be working OK but I noticed a problem with the audio. There would be periodic, very brief drop-outs in the sound when watching a video. Annoying and a real problem as I like to record music through the computer. So then I restored the system settings.

This fixed the audio problem. It probably set a higher priority for audio data, not really sure, but the problem was solved. I would have been sunk without the system settings disk.

It reminded me it pays to read the instructions, even for something as simple as replacing a battery.

Just thought I'd share.
 
Just for future reference, leave it plugged in when replacing that CR2032. As long as you have a power supply plugged in and switched on, your BIOS settings will be saved during the swap.
 
Not only that, but you should have the time configured to use a time server so that the time is always correct.
 
Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Not only that, but you should have the time configured to use a time server so that the time is always correct.


This still doesn't seem to prevent the time issues on windows systems when that CMOS battery starts to fail.
 
Originally Posted By: GiveMeAVowel
Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Not only that, but you should have the time configured to use a time server so that the time is always correct.


This still doesn't seem to prevent the time issues on windows systems when that CMOS battery starts to fail.


Probably because it only syncs once a week. There's a few things you have to do to get it to sync more often.
 
you were lucky only the time settings were getting fudged up and the rest of the system settings in the BIOS were still OK when you saved up the settings. Saving up already altered settings wouldn't have helped you. I'm not saying that would have been a disaster, but resetting BIOS data to get the system working right is not that difficult if you know what you're doing.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: berniedd
you were lucky only the time settings were getting fudged up and the rest of the system settings in the BIOS were still OK when you saved up the settings.


System time getting buggered up seems, luckily, to be the canary in the coal mine, so to speak. I have had this happen a half a dozen times in the last 15 years and am grateful each time that that is all that went wrong!
 
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