They said some computers wouldn't even start the first time for some reason if you put the battery in without doing this. I was skepticle but on the other hand maybe they forgot to reset up their bios but there may be something to it with old computers.
I just thought, you said the bios can hold for a while with the residual charge. Maybe it's trying to run the set and the flashed base bios settings together and it's jamming the system. I remember the clock would always change but some settings would not change at all if I shutdown for just a second or 2. Maybe it's that so to make sure the system starts at known norms and not 1/2 base and 1/2 personal user set settings. That would make sense because some guys would likely have the case open and have that battery out in a second and the new one in hand and just drop the old on and put in the new one in under 10 seconds.I used to have that kind of internet computer addiction in the 90's.Played Diablo original for 62 hrs after working my last day of the week 12 hr shift. I was seeing 3 of everything when I finally decided to sleep after being awake almost 75 hrs straight. I tried to just go fast but ended up crawling on hands and knees since triple vision makes you dizzy as fuck after sitting 4 hrs between piss breaks. The weed was helping to focus me and not let me realize I was dangerously without sleep or nutrition since eating was not on the computer.
Hell I accidentally while working on this one thought I was awake for 2 days but then found out I was 2 days off and realize I was up over 80 hrs with a couple of 4 hr naps in that time but my adrenaline to get this fucker working right and about 200 internet searches through off my sense of time passing. But shit happens. :)
That sounds like some of the talk I overheard years ago at a hamfest. Some guys were talking about the "special diodes" that would open up after so many hours and ruin your motherboard.
If you really want to be safe, reset the CMOS to defaults after replacing your battery, and re-program it. Other than that, if it's getting corrupted then you probably have other issues.
I've seen some pretty shitty hardware, my first motherboard was a Shuttle and I had a 75mhz pentium, the thing is I tried to clock it to 75 but it would only handle 66 since it would only stably do multiples with 33mhz base clock, I was so pissed my board underclocked itself. I wanted to upgrade to a bigger cpu but the guy i talked to all the time told me he'd give me a good deal on a new board and cpu when he did an upgrade for someone else. Ended up waiting and ordering online a 333mgz amd K7 and a gigabyte motherboard,truly a sweet combination with 98se and the computer guy did help, I helped him unload 25 monitors and PC's "His back was sore" from the UPS truck and I then was going to leave and he say wait dude come here, gives me 2 64mb sdram chips, like $160 back then but he was given them if he ordered around 25 computers so he could profit on upgrades, he had like 10 more of them given to him for the order. He told me the guys that sell the computers get them for around $5 and sell them for $80 and he just tripled my ram for helping for 10 minutes getting the ups order stacked 12 ft behind the counter. I was truly happy that day I was a helpful person.
Getting that much RAM is pretty awesome. I remember RAM costing a boatload of money for a while and being hard to get. Do not miss those days, although it remains to be seen where it's going to go now with China hogging all the chip capacity.
Had an old laptop like that, a WinBook from Micro Center. It was strangely upgradeable, replaced the original Pentium 2 with some bastard AMD P3 clone. It was a 466MHz CPU, but the same thing happened, the clock limited it to something like 413MHz. I was still pretty happy, a machine from the Win98 days (Not even SE) could mostly play DVDs, and it served me well into the 2000s. Screen finally gave out on it, they had a problem with the rubber interconnects coming apart.
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