Have you ever come across a failing coin cell battery in your PC or laptop?
At my work we manage many computers through cloud management infrastructure, and of course with the world working more remotely now it's difficult when there's a problem locally with the machine.
When the power would go out in the building by being tripped or just by the power cord accidentally pulled out, it would cause the PCs to not function properly.
Of course I did a bit of digging and had my suspicions when I saw the PC stuck with Dell Logo stuck through Power on Self-Test. It would then display a black screen with 'time of day not set' and 'invalid configuration information'.
I pressed F2 to take me to BIOS Setup and saw that in System Configuration that most of the configuration had been reset to factory default settings. Also noticed in General with the Date/Time that the BIOS clock was out. The Power Management settings also changed so it would put the computer to sleep which is super annoying since our orginsation relies on these PCs being awake at all times.
The PC's affected also did a LED power light diagnostic where it would blink amber twice, and then white 4 times. This in the manual was the coin cell battery failure which I thought it would be.
The PC's are out of warranty but I'm not allowed to replace the CR2032 lithium coin cell battery, and instead we have to wait for brand new PCs.
It's an annoying situation to say the least because when the PC's power goes out to the affected machines the whole cycle starts again and PCs have to be locally reconfigured.
I understand this as the CMOS memory is non volatile and is meant to remember the BIOS Settings. However due to the coin cell battery failure providing the power to the CMOS memory, it's causing these settings to reset each time. It's almost as if it's just volatile memory again like RAM with a set of instructions at the time the PC is powered on.
Please let me know if you've come across this issue.
Thanks.
Clan Defy -
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11-Feb-2023 08:50:01
- Last edited on
11-Feb-2023 08:54:48
by
Plonster
