Reminder: if your CMOS battery goes flat, your PC will sulk!

[Andrew_McP]

Look, it's been a while, ok? The PC in question still has a [email protected] (with the original, faulty SATA controller motherboard!) but it still does what I ask, thanks to a 1070 upgrade a few years ago. However, I've been using a low end gaming laptop for a long time as my main machine, so the big, noisy box only goes on if I fancy some 27" screen time or to fire up a flight/racing sim. I've always had a backup machine though, for peace of mind, and the 2500k has been it for a long time. So when, 2 weeks since it was last used, I turned it on yesterday and nothing happened, I was a bit rusty in my debugging skills.

Ok, very rusty! Very long story short... CMOS battery. Flat as a pancak... well, flat as a CMOS battery actually. But doubly flat in this case. And curse MSI for putting it under the graphics card. Military Class pain in the @ss!

Right... 'scuse me... I have a lot of cable and screw faff to do. It was all fields and CRT tubes round here once, you know?

PS I had to open my box of old graphics cards to find an ancient spare Corsair PSU... and pause, in the process, to shed a tear over not having saved my Matrox Millennium or first 3DFx card. But I did stroke my Voodoo 2 #TMI and lightly polish my Voodoo 3. Those were the days... bleeding edge graphics cards only required some overtime then, not a mortgage!

 

[sx_turbo]

I enjoyed reading this

Takes me back to the rose tinted glasses days, loved the beige cases, and the rats nest wiring, dodgy ide cables and hard drives with their jumpers....

In reality PC'ing is so much easier today, almost plug and play everything, and software is generally much more stable (excluding games)

I'm sure it used to be much more fun, but again that might just be the rose tinted glasses effect from child hood

 

[Werewolf]

Flat bios batteries do odd things, especially with some of the older machines and OS's.

Younger brother had a machine that would routinely not connect to Skype due to an "invalid SSL certificate", it turned out it was the bios battery and if we manually told windows (XP IIRC) to sync it's time it would work again.