Electrical Question

Firetastic

Hi,

Have had a power cut this morning. Anyway the power is back on. I have an old dell inspiron 531 that I haven't used for a while. Still plugged in and everything.

Anyway power came back on went and did something else. Came into room and heard a funny noise. Looked over at it and it is switched on making a funny noise. Nothing on the screen or anything. Switched it off the bad way and switched it back on. Got a message saying something cmos check strike F1 to continue and now it's on no probs so far. What happened?

esuhl

It sounds like the motherboard battery might be low. Or, having not been used for a while, the trickle of juice coming from the battery was insufficient to retain the CMOS settings without corruption.

So long as it boots fine and you don't get the problem again, it's probably nothing to worry about. If you'd had any problems, the first thing to do would be to reset the CMOS values to default and save them again.

If the issue keeps recurring, you may need to replace the CR2032 battery.

Firetastic

Just wanted to update this. I remembered that if you have CMOS battery problems then the time/date goes out of sync. I had a look at the date and time and it said 30 December 2006 23:40 LOL. I didn't even have that computer then. Don't think it would have been made even. Anyway have changed the time. What would cause it to just come on by itself?

Shimrod

Within the BIOS there is most likely a setting to say what happens when the power is supplied to the PC (as opposed to turning the PC on). In most cases, the default is 'power off' i.e. don't do anything, but it sounds like it your case it was set to 'power on'. I have a home server, and have 'power on' set so that it will restart automatically after a power cut or similar.

Firetastic

I thought it was a power surge that caused it to come on or something. I think I've heard of that happening? The other computer I had to press the power like normal.

Firetastic

Well just switched it on this morning and it's fine again. So thanks everybody for the information. It's useful to know. Just make sure I boot it up once a week or something.