On Thu, 2017-05-25 at 12:47 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote: > Otherwise, with a weak battery the BIOS will usually revert to default > settings which are generally considered conservative and "safe". I'm not so sure that's the case. In many PCs, the BIOS clock, BIOS memory, and perhaps other BIOS hardware, are powered solely by the battery (even when the computer is running off mains power). So, with failing power you could have all manner of random things happen. Digital circuits don't work well when not fully powered. If it had completely failed, then I might expect default settings to be adopted at power up - assuming that the computer would power up with a dead BIOS battery. Though some BIOSs use an EEPROM as non-volatile memory, rather than just low-power RAM with a battery to keep it working. Making a loss of settings very hard. A friend of mine had a PC with a three-way switch to decide which BIOS settings to use when booting up, and if I recall correctly, two of them were EEPROM stored. It was designed as a geeks motherboard, you could use the feature to have turbo settings, stable settings, experimental settings, and always be able to boot up by flipping the switch if you'd changed something in a bad way. If you believe your BIOS settings may have been scrambled, it may be a good idea to select the reset to default options, save them, go back and set any personal options, to force that all BIOS settings are reset. I'm still not convinced with the cargo-cult idea that the BIOS clock is actually designed to run slow, rather than that simply being a common side-effect. I've certainly had a motherboard where that effect did not happen. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
