There were already a couple threads from this article. but to avoid being off-topic… here I is!
There is a handy dandy little watch battery in your desktop computer, this is for powering your CMOS (BIOS settings). This does a few things for you, it remembers some hardware specifications and settings and remembers what time and date it is. This is nice. Because if this battery goes out you can have some goofy problems. You should always keep power to your computer because as long as there is power that battery isn’t drained. I promise you’ll pay more for that power that’s on that battery you buy than you do from the electric company. A lot of these problems are becoming past tense with newer versions of windows but some still lurk.
Hurray for volatile memory!!!
(yes ive dumbed a lot of it down, but if you’d like to nitpick HAVE AT IT)
That’s pretty interesting I’ve had to replace several in computers that weren’t that old. That’s really suprising to me, I wonder why it would differ so much. It’s not uncommon for them to have gone out after being unplugged for a couple weeks. Now you got me interested… lol. I’m gonna see if i cant dig something up.
Ok so apparently there is 2 common types used in puters, lithium (not lithium-ion) and NiCad the former lasting approx 5-10 years and not being rechargable and the latter lasting about 2-3 years and being rechargeable. Alkaline batteries are more infrequent. Most articles suggest that powering off your computer initiates battery use, while one said that (at least on ATX boards) there is a 5v standby power to the CMOS (which would most closely support what I have observed). Of course the battery’s life can be significantly shortened by variables such as heat as well as the motherboard’s usage of the power.