The purpose of the battery on the motherboard is to keep all of the
vital things running on your machine if you loose power or turn off the
machine...such as time, date etc...

Steve

>>> [log in to unmask] 12/14/01 16:49 PM >>>
Hello,

Does flash memory have to be "recharged" continuosly like RAM? Is that
the
purpose of the battery on my motherboard? If the battery becomes weak
does
the entire BIOS fail?

Personally I have a new gigabyte motherboard and I recently flashed my
BIOS
and I did not have any problems.

Thanks
Abdul Samad Abdul Razzak,
Sri Lanka.


----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 2:48 PM
Subject: Re: Flashing a BIOS


> >
>   BIOSes used to be stored on ROM (EPROM, actually) chips, but most
> modern motherboards use "flash" memory instead.  The big difference
> is that the contents of flash memory can be rewritten in place on the
> motherboard -- to update an EPROM, you'd have to take it out of the
> motherboard and use a special "EPROM burner" device to rewrite the
> contents.
>
>   "flashing the BIOS" is installing an update to the BIOS code by
> running a utility to rewrite the flash memory with the new code
> version.  It's a way of correcting bugs or enabling new features in
> systems that have already been bought and used.
>
>   The original poster's theory was that updating to a more recent
> BIOS version might allow his system to take advantage of higher-
> density memory modules than it originally supported.
>   Andrew's suggestion is that the system's limited RAM capacity
> probably represents limitations in the actual hardware, such as the
> memory controller, rather than in the BIOS software, and so a BIOS
> update cannot "corrct" this aspect of the motherboard's design.
>
> David Gillett
>

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