Bios Settings and Motherboard Battery

[massive88]

My computer has many bios settings that are off from the default, such that I do not want to lose them.

My problem is, I have LEDs that are wired into the USB, that never turn off unless I kill the powerstrip that the computer is plugged into.  And with the machine being played only a few hours a week at most, it seems excessive to leave those lights on 24/7.

So my question becomes, if I constantly have the computer basically "unplugged" when not in use, will it drain the motherboard battery faster?  Thus causing me to have to resetup all my custom bios options?

And secondly, if I am using a "Wake up on PS2 Mouse" option to turn on the computer (once the power strip is on) will that cause any change to the drain on my motherboard battery?  I assume it has to have power from somewhere to read if the mouse is clicking or not, but does it still try to read that info if it is unplugged?

[SirPeale]

The battery drain should be at a constant rate, so there really isn't any danger of losing your settings until the battery dies.

That said...you should check the voltage on the battery to see how far along it is. 

Of course, that involves removing the battery while the computer is off.

[massive88]

I know my battery will die eventually at some point,  I guess the question is, will it happen noticably faster due to one or both of these factors:

A) Having the computer essentially completely unplugged when not in use

B) Utilizing the "Wake on PS2 Mouse" feature of the motherboard

[Sammie]

I would say no

wake on PS2 mouse basically just puts the PC in sleep mode,which is why you still have power to the USB port.

I have pulled 386's out of storage (a year ago), fired them up and the bios battery is still holding a charge.

Sammie

[NOP]

I was thinking that if you really want to be safe, you could always backup your CMOS settings to a file, then if your battery ever does die, just replace it and jam the settings back in.

I then started looking for a CMOS save/restore tool to point you to, and it looks like people are trying to charge $24.95+ for such a thing, which is beyond crazy.  I wrote something 15+ years ago to save and restore the 2 CMOS banks to a text file and allows you to jam them back in.  Provided newer machines haven't changed the hardware access or the size of CMOS itself, I see no reason why it shouldn't still work.

I'll send it to you for $23.95  (I'm kidding!, just shoot me a PM)  I will need to find it though, that could take awhile.

-jeff!

[massive88]

I appreciate the help, the problem isnt really that I cant reconfigure the bios, more that I dont want to be doing it regularly should my battery be drained unusually fast.

I only mentioned the settings because if I ran everything off the default, the battery dying wouldnt make a bit of difference, the settings are inert.

I guess ill just go with it and see if my battery dies quickly or not.

[Chunce DeLeone]

I think I am having a similar problem.  I also uplugg everything when finished, and recently I have had a "verifying dmi pool data"  hang on the boot and then it goes to this weird "Mac Address FFFFFFF.FFFFFFFFFF.FFFF"  I switched hard rive and it went to "verifying dmi pool data" then after a few minutes it said boot disk error,  I know the hard drive is good,  from what i have read and gathered this may have something to do with the battery or boot sector of the drive,  really weird,  If I knew the batttery was being draind I wouldn't have unpluged the PC,  we shall see, looks like I'm going to have to deal with blank stares and shoulder shruggs at Radio Shack tonight looking for this battery, also if it is the boot sector.....how does the boot sector get compromised?  how can i avoid that?  I recently put this Arcade pc online which is something I never wanted to do,  I also put a new HD in there to try out MEdia Center, then when I switched back to my gaming HD with XP beast all this whacky crap started happening, and it was the next reboot after getting two player Virtua Tennis 3 going with JOYTOKEY and classic Wicos,  with the good comes the bad!!!!!!!!!!!