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I'm taking a uni course on electrical engineering and my textbook says that the CMOS battery used to last between 2 and 10 years. Since preserving BIOS settings seems quite important to me, I was wondering what happened when the CMOS battery ran out. Were the settings lost? Did you have to reset them when you had system power? Or did you have to change the CMOS battery?

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    Why the past tense here, my PC still has a cmos battery...
    – PlasmaHH
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 20:41
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    Replace the battery and run BIOS setup, if you need to set it up. Since x286 I forgot what you need to set in BIOS.
    – Marko Buršič
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 20:46
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    We had a 486 as kids games computer with a dead CMOS battery for a couple of years. My three year old learned the key sequence to go to BIOS setup, set the hard-drive autoconfigure, accept the date and time, save and reboot. He hadn't a clue what he was doing but his speed and confidence were inspiring.
    – Transistor
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 23:19
  • you needed to set the hard drive parameters: Cylinders, heads, sectors, later BIOSs were been able to autodetect that. also set the time and date. and possiblly other features like your preferred boot sequence and numlock setting.
    – Jasen
    Commented Jan 21, 2016 at 20:16

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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PCs (and many laptops/netbooks) have a backup battery to preserve any volatile settings, and to keep the clock (RTC) ticking over so the computer knows the time - if you have ever wondered how you computer still knows what time it is even if you unplug it from the mains, the battery powered RTC is how. This battery is in most cases only used when there is no mains power.

In terms of what happens, it depends partly on the BIOS.

In older BIOS's and probably many new ones two, the settings would basically delete on power loss (they are in volatile memory). In fact there is a jumper which disconnects the battery and standby power to allow you to reset the BIOS settings.

Some modern BIOS's store the data in non-volatile memory, so all the battery dying would do is clear the clock.

Note that all of the above assumes there is no mains power. If the power is on (Either when the PSU is powered on, or so long as there is mains to drive the standby rail), the BIOS will remain powered and losing the battery would do nothing.

If your computer is always plugged in to the mains, you may never notice the battery is dead. But as soon as you have a power cut or unplug, the time goes away, suddenly you are back in the 90's or whatever preset date/time is hardcoded into the BIOS.

Once dead, you can usually just replace it with a new coin cell, restore the time settings any non-default BIOS settings (if that is volatile), and you're good to go for another few years. If you replace it while the PSU is supplying standby power and before the battery is completely dead, you may even not have to change any settings.

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  • Actually, some PCs would not start at all if the cmos battery is dead. Happened to me with an old IBM PC using a Pentium III (to give a timeframe).
    – Sredni Vashtar
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 21:52
  • In addition, most PCs will not draw any current from the battery when mains power is supplied (+5V stand-by is supplied from the PSU). In this case, the battery life is only limited by its shelf-life.
    – DoxyLover
    Commented Jan 20, 2016 at 22:53

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