CMOS Battery Failure.

[MartinW 0]

Had an issue over the last couple of days.

PC was booting straight to the UEFI. When I did boot back into windows from the UEFI, I noticed my task bar icons were mostly gone, and the two that were there, weren't clickable. Had been having trouble with missing icons for a while.

At first I wasn't sure what the issue was, especially since Crystal Disk Info was giving me a caution on my Hard Drive, reallocated sector count, and current pending sector count. Kind off led me in the direction of a possible hard drive issue. PC has been very slow as well.

Then I noticed that my clock was set right back to 2009, no doubt the original UEFI manufacture date, so I began to suspect the battery. Sure enough, have replaced the battery, all icons are now back, and clickable.

But the reason I post this, is because you may not think a symptom like missing icons, and icons not clickable is a symptom of as knackered CMOS battery. Well it is, in fact the icons were misbehaving long before the PC lost it's time, and failed to fire up windows.

System is definitely way faster than it was, to be honest, I'm not sure how a failing CMOS battery could slow down a PC, but it seems to have done for me.

[mutley 4,498]

Wow, thanks for the heads up Martin, it's worth bearing in mind when nothing else makes sense.

[phil white 274]

Is that the battery on the Motherboard that looks like a watch battery?

[mutley 4,498]

Yep, usually a bit bigger than a watch battery, about 20mm in diameter.

[dogtrack 346]

Sounds about right. Lifespan of Lithium Cells is about 5 years on low usage items like Motherboards. Time loss with the clock is the first sign of forthcoming failure.

[MartinW 0]

Yep, time loss on clock is symptomatic of battery failure. In addition the tendency to boot straight to the UEFI/BIOS. All overclock settings will be lost too usually.

But loss of icons and the icons that are there not clickable was a new one on me. Not come across that before.

 

 

can't remember what size mine was, but easy to pick up at your local Maplin for a few quid, or any shop that has a good selection of batteries.

 

 

[MartinW 0]

P.S.

 

Mutant... very impressed with your International Rescue employee.

 

You can't beat a bit of Thunderbirds, except with a bit of Stingray of course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[flybytes 34]

Martin,

 

Most modern mother-boards use non-volatile flash memory, which doesn't require a battery to retain its BIOS data. Unfortunately the real-time clock does need a battery to keep the time & date ticking over when the PC is switched off, although this may be a rechargeable battery.

 

Why your PC should slow down is a bit of a mystery but one possible cause could be if you have a lot of time limited free/demo applications loaded. These would be de-activated when their time limit has run out. In the past I have been able to re-activate some of these apps by setting the PC clock to an earlier date. Perhaps when your RTC battery fails, causing the date to reset to an earlier time, some of these apps become re-activated resulting in more background tasks, thus slowing the PC.

 

Ray.

 

[MartinW 0]

Overclock settings were definitely lost Ray. Booted straight to UEFI, and set to defaults. That happened three times. Doesn't.take much for this Asus board to panic and reset to defaults I've found. Also happens to be the worst overclocker I've owned to be honest.

As for performance being better, it didn't make sense to me either, as I said above. It was probably my imagination Perhaps.