replacing system battery

I'm thinking of replacing the battery because for some time now my pc has been giving me the following message at boot: "Alert! System battery voltage is low." Am I on the right track on this one? I assume the message is referring to the cmos cr3023 battery. syrk

 

Hi Syrk,

I think you are 100% on this. Batts should last 6 - 8 yrs, but have been known to poop out much sooner.

Jim

 

There are several reasons you could be getting this message other than the battery actually getting low. One is the part of the board that watches it, is not reading it correctly. If you have a volt ohm meter you can check its voltage yourself. They typically are 3 volt batteries but will still operate if they don't go to far below 2.5. As long as your not loosing your bios information because the cmos memory keeps all your tweaks and settings you should be ok until it falls too low. And if you don't mess with the bios much you will not loose much but the date and time when it does fail.

 

My Dell Dimension 8300 dates to September of 2003. In the last two months my bios lost the date and time only twice. Appzalien: what do you mean by " is not reading it correctly"? syrk

 

Hi again Syrk,

App is correct. The time and date usually (maybe by design) begins to change grossly when the batt gets near the end of life. As it gets worse you start looseing all your BIOS Setup and will get an error message.Jim

 

CMOS batteries are simply to replace and only a couple of dollars, I wouldn't debate changing it.

 

Just like apps that are meant to read your temps can read them differently depending on how they're programmed, your motherboards chipset with the battery checker could become corrupted and read a good battery as bad. This is a one in a million chance, as a matter of fact I have never heard of it happening, but just as batteries can go bad, circuits and chips can too. The result would be you would buy a new battery and in a few weeks it would be read as being low again, thats the clue that there is something wrong with the way the motherboard is seeing the battery or that the mobo is not properly charging the battery.

 

I changed the battery and the computer works perfect. syrk