Allegedly, on or about 18 May 2017, William sent: > "I didn't know workstations nowadays had batteries. When the system is > back on its feet, I'll try to check that. It was bought in 2013." > > I knew that the older motherboards had batteries. But I thought the > newer ones used something like flash (or other persistent) memory. It > did not occur to me that booting might want the date/time before the > boot process reached the point of being able to access the internet. You can't store time. It's continuously changing. There are a few ways of keeping a clock ticking while the power is off: Run the clock off a watch battery, and most systems do. It's always running off the battery, even when the mains power is applied. It keeps the clock independent. Do so with a rechargeable battery, that the system recharges when it's running. My sister's ancient Mac did that. I think at least one of my Amigas did, too, if I recall correctly. Use a super-capacitor. One that can hold a charge for a very long time. Many VCRs used to do that. They're usually powered up all the time, but used the super-cap to keep the clock running during power-outs, and saving people the headache of resetting the clock if they needed to unplug and move their VCR. Most computers are at least partially powered up all the time (since few people actually switch them off at the wall), or are powered up often enough to keep the clock running until the next time that you switch on, so this is a mostly viable option. But the first option is going to be the most common approach in the PC world. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages posted to the mailing list. Ha ha ha ha... (I couldn't think of a good joke, so I supplied a laugh track, instead.) _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
