Tim: >> Or had the CMOS battery going flat? ToddAndMargo: > Have not noticed my date and time messed up, but ... I've found that only when a battery was *really* bad that time may be off. It could be sufficiently low to be a problem, and your clock still keeps time. Especially if your PC supplies mains-derived power to the BIOS/UEFI when running, and the battery is a back-up rather than the only supply for it. There's an often stated claim the BIOSs are designed to run slow when the power is low, but I don't have faith in that. I think people are trying to fit their own explanation into something that happened by accident. It may well be that some do that, simply by virtue of how the circuit behaves rather than being a deliberate effect, but I've got PCs which kept very good time with a near dead battery (they are designed to be a really low power consumption device). When their batteries did die, the clocks simply resetted to some distant date in the past, and drive parameters went haywire. If motherboard manufacturers wanted to make it obvious that you needed to change a battery, they could have designed the BIOS with a voltage reading that any OS could easily read without arcane knowledge, and your OS could pop up a warning which told you what was needed. Expecting the masses of computer illiterate to know that the clock being off might mean you need to change a battery, rather than them just writing the behaviour off as yet another Windows setting screw-up is a bit of an ask. And it's a hidden effect by so many systems which continuously auto-correct the clock. > I do change a lot of CMOS batteries for my customers. Bearing in mind that many of those coin batteries have an expected working lifespan of about 3 years (that's less than their shelf-life), it may be worth simply replacing them that often without trying to squeeze the last morsels of power out of them until things go obviously wrong. And modern batteries have worse chemistry than older batteries (less pollutant, by a fractional amount, but far more prone to leaking and causing corrosive damage). I give my PCs a vacuum once or twice a year, and I write a maintenance log in texta inside the lid (last cleaned so-and-so-date, new battery, etc). I've got a very old iMac sitting next to me that needs a new coin battery put in it, but thanks to idiotic design for cosmetics rather than practicality, you have to remove every single bit of hardware from the casing to get to the battery at the back of everything (lots of interconnected boards and devices). Why they couldn't have mounted it on the other side of the board I don't know. I'm tempted to use a hole saw on the cabinet to make replacing it much easier. That, or I'll solder in a battery holder on fly leads and put it in a much more sensible place. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.92.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 20 11:48:01 UTC 2023 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
