Bios battery question

[Lemon law]

To cut to the chase, in the last six weeks, my computer has gone from 100% reliable to totally squirrelelly.

Thus far I have replaced my sata HDD, but it refused to even format until I removed my bios battery when it refused to post. Waiting 20 minutes and loading bios defaults did the trick, I was able to format the drive, reinstall window, do the windows updates and reconfigure, and now its back to the same ole problems.

This morning it booted fine, lasted an hour or so and crashed, I did a reset, it again booted up and lasted 10 minutes, I reset again, and now it does nothing after I removed the bios battery and reinserted it a half hour later.

This a year old mobo, no visible bulged caps, power supply voltages have always been fine, memory has always passed mentest86, I am almost 100% sure its not a malware problem, but what to do now?????????????????????

Sadly, shorting pins 2&3 will not be easy because they are buried, now I am trying the remove the cmos battery trick for six hours at least.

And troubleshoot tips appreciated, but when it will not post or boot, I am clueless.

 

[Billb2]

Heat?

 

[Pantlegz]

do you have any way of testing the psu voltage at the moment? It sounds like it took a dump. removing the CMOS battery for a second should be plenty.

 

[jackschmittusa]

Shorting the pins and removing the battery do the same thing, they cut the battery out of the circuit. A minute should suffice for any tiny caps in the cmos chip to discharge.

Do you ever see any error messages? Bad batteries usually generate a "checksum error".

Doesn't sound like a thermal issue if it wouldn't boot after a half hour unpowered.

Do you turn your rig on and off frequently? Heating and cooling the parts can cause "thermal creep" where parts (cards in particular) work their way out of the slots from expanding and contracting. Pull the cards and re-insert them to fix this. Do the same to the ram while you are at it. Since the slots have spring loaded fingers in them, this also tends to clean any corrosion from the contacts.

Remove all of the mb power connectors, take a wire or paperclip and short the green wire to any black wire on the 24 pin mb power connector. The psu should start.

Lastly, try to start the rig with only 1 stick of ram, vid card, cpu/hsf powered (remove front panel connectors and other cards). If it starts then, hook one thing back up at a time. I have seen bad optical drives and cards create a "no boot" problem, especially after a thunderstorm.

There are other things to try if these fail to find the problem.

 

[pcgeek11]

This morning it booted fine, lasted an hour or so and crashed, I did a reset, it again booted up and lasted 10 minutes, I reset again, and now it does nothing after I removed the bios battery and reinserted it a half hour later.

After the machine is booted the BIOS information is running in RAM and the CMOS Battery has NO Effect at all. You could remove the BIOS chip at this point and the PC will never know the difference until you try and reboot. Basically it isn't a BIOS Battery problem.