Hi to all,

I am having a very unusual problem and any help will be greatly appreciated.

the system has a very old mobo made by PC PARTNER with intel 810 chipsets. the current o/s is win 98se. to go back a little, someone had earlier installed win xp pro (after disabling all on board video, sound, usb ports,.. and installing pci cards for video,sound, usb...).since it was giving frequent problems after that i got hold of it and decided the mobo will simply not support win xp pro.

formatted the hdd, found out the drivers for on board video,sound usb etc, and installed win 98 se with 256 mb of ram which it originally had and all the drivers. ( the low momory could have been one of the reasons for it's earlier problems with xp pro)

the bios is award modular version 6.00PG (energy star ally) and bios -N-4M (2K000314)

the boot options are, floppy, cdrom, hdd 0, 1, 2, 3, SCSI, ZIP, LAN, LS 120 and disabled (not in this order). I have set it to floppy, cdrom, hdd0 in that order.
it has only one hdd.

in the " integrated peripherals " menu there is an item " initial disply first" and the options are onboard / pci slot. i have set this to onboard. in fact all the pci slots are mow empty.

now the questions...

(1) what is LS 120 in the boot menu options?.

(2) after i shut down the system for the day and start up next day or whenever the post msg shows a checksum error and defaults loaded. this happens every day. the date goes back to jan 1st 2000 and the LS 120 boot option appears either second or third in rank, and the initial display reverts back to pci slot. if i press f1 to continue the video comes on fine but the dates get messed up and my avg antivirus task bar icon goes black because of the wrong dates

(3) i tried changing the cmos battery twice but still same problem.

(4) i have of course saved my settings whenever i enter bios after the checksum error.

(5) why are the bios settings not getting saved?. cmos chipset fried or going that way?

(6) other than this the system runs fine and is mainly used for e-mail, surfing, some word processing, card games (not on line)etc 

thanks and good day to all---Venkat

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