Re: phoenix bios
Here's my guess, Mike. It was set to 'Silent' and it no longer is, so he
never used to see the bios at all. Obviously that is something the 'dying
battery' could cause. It almost seems too much of a coincidence, that the
*only* setting lost would be that one - but that would be to misunderstand
the nature of probabiility, wouldn't it? Or some 'knowledgeable friend'
changed it (the sort of thing I do, actually, but only for the duration of
the work - unless I forget to change it back, that is!). But one would
suppose the OP would have mentioned a friend having recently worked on it,
at least someone with the good sense to change nothing and ask what's going
on.
As with almost everything else (I seem to have let a virtually charmed life
<g>) I have never experienced a failing CMOS battery. All these hardware
issues (failing HDD, bad RAM et al) are going to hit me eventually, I just
know it! Probably all at once.
Shane
Mike M wrote:
> The BIOS is the "glue" between your hardware and the software . BIOS
> meaning Basic Input Output System. See
> http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/BIOS.html for more details. The BIOS
> is a set of instructions stored in a chip on your motherboard and
> also contains some volatile information such as details of your hard
> drive and other hardware together with the date and time. The fixed
> data is stored in ROM however a small amount of volatile data is
> stored in CMOS RAM and requires a small battery to power this.
>
> Without knowing the message you are seeing it is difficult to know
> what is happening but one possibility is that the battery has come to
> the end of its life and needs replacing. When this happens the BIOS
> loses all of its volatile settings and sets itself back to default.
> Perhaps that is what is happening here. For example are you having
> to reset the time and date after switching on your PC?
>
>> Until 2 weeks ago I had not heard of phoenix bios. Now every time I
>> start up my computer it is there. I always exit it without saving
>> changes, but I don't know what I am doing.
>>
>> What is it and why is it there every time?