Hi,

Batteries can come in all shapes and sizes and are sometimes not really
batteries.

There was a period of time the main board manufacturor's used a "RTC" or
"Dallas" Clock chip instead of a battery.  This was common from 386 to P1
systems.  They have all pretty much changed over to less costly batteries (
cr2025 etc) since then.  RTC's are okay uless you leave the system off for
a great deal of time.

The RTC was really a capacitor that got charged when the mainboard was
powered up and then would discharge
keeping the CMOS up to snuff over time.  It saved on batteries that cold
leak or corrode and ruin the main board.  Unfortunatley, RTC's were
relativly expensive = about $20-30 to replace if needed to be.  Batteries
are much cheaper.  That's why the switch, plus batteries have been much
improved since the beginning days.

Most boards had a jumper near the RTC and when it was removed you could
attach an external battery to it such as a Ray-o-Vac 844 and the RTC was
disabled.  The RTC books like a small rectangle about 1 inch by 1/2 inch
and usually, though not always, plugged into a socket on the main board so
it could be changed if need be.

Joe




At 12:28 PM 02/16/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>I'm trying to re-install windows 95 on an old computer but to no avail.
>I had to reformat the hard drive because it had partially win98 on it.
>Tried using the f-disk command and the bootdisk but nothing seems to be
working now.
>I can't get past the press F1 to resume.
>It keeps saying cmos battery is low? How do you fix this problem then?
>I looked but could not find a cmos battery; what if this computer hasn't
got a cmos battery?????? Is the only option than the Flashing of the hard
drive??
>Some feedback would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks in advance
>Martha Shade
>
>         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
>                     visit our download web page at:
>                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml
>
Thanks,

Joe

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