Some years ago I had an IBM ThinkPad that one day failed to boot, and every
subsystem diagnostic that ran at power-up (keyboard, memory, disk
controller, ...) reported a problem. On a whim I put in a new clock
battery and everything was fine. Now any time a machine suddenly goes
flakey, the clock battery is the first thing that gets replaced.
On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 21:22:17 +0930,Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2017-05-25 at 12:47 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> > Otherwise, with a weak battery the BIOS will usually revert to default
> > settings which are generally considered conservative and "safe".
>
> I'm not so sure that's the case. In many PCs, the BIOS clock, BIOS
> memory, and perhaps other BIOS hardware, are powered solely by the
> battery (even when the computer is running off mains power). So, with
> failing power you could have all manner of random things happen.
>