Thread: Why causes my PC require a battery

Most PCs have a little battery. In many cases, the battery is joined exactly onto the CPU board, but the battery is commonly in few sort of holder so it is simple to exchange. Computers are not the just things that have a little battery similar this -- camcorders and digital cameras much have them, also. Only about any gadget that maintains track of the time will have a battery.


In your PC, the battery powers a chip called the Real Time Clock chip. The RTC is basically a quartz watch that functions entire the time, whether or not the computer has power. The battery powers this clock. When the PC boots up, part of the work is to query the RTC to assume the perfect time and date. A small quartz clock similar to this may function for 5 to 7 years off of a little battery. Then it is time to exchange the battery.




This does not explicate why your PC would not boot, however. You would looks the computer to boot well but have an wrong time and date. The reason your computer would not boot is because the RTC chip also includes 64 bytes of random access memory. The clock applies 10 bytes of this place, departure 54 bytes for other intentions. The BIOS shops entire sorts of data in the CMOS RAM field, similar to the number of floppy and hard disk drives, the hard disk drive kind, etc. If the CMOS RAM loses power, the computer might not familiar anything about the hard disk configuration of your device, and therefore it cannot boot.


Many more fresh computers are not rather so dependent on the CMOS RAM. They save the circumstances in non-volatile RAM that function without any power at all. If the battery goes dead, the clock goes wrong but the computer can even boot utilizing the data in the non-volatile RAM field.