CMOS Battery needs to be replaced frequently-please help

[quicky008]

I bought an asrock wolfdale ddr2 667 motherboard last year to replace a dead motherboard that was present in one of my older systems.Although this board is working pretty well and i've had no major issues with it so far,i've observed that its cmos battery needs to be replaced once every 2-3 months,which is really frustrating.

Initially i was under the impression that the batteries i was using were definitely of poor quality,hence they were getting depleted so fast and so i decided to replace the older battery with a genuine maxell cr2032 cell a few months back.But to my great dismay,this battery too hardly lasted more than 3 months and now everytime i turn my computer on,it displays the wrong date and time and the bios settings are reset to their default values.

I think its very unusual for the cmos batteries to run out so quickly-the older motherboard that i had earlier never needed any battery replacement and it ran perfectly fine for 4-5 years at a stretch.This issue is extremely odd and annoying to say the least.Is there any way to determine what might be wrong?Does the fault lie with the motherboard itself or the batteries themselves are defective?Please advice what i should do to resolve this problem.

 

[Desmond]

Looks like a faulty motherboard. I doubt that the CMOS cell would run out so quick considering that it is only used to maintain the state of the BIOS when the machine is powered off. Even then it could last years.

 

[amit.tiger12]

How you find cmos battery need to replace??

 

[chris]

How you find cmos battery need to replace??

When PC turned on, it will ask you to press F1 or go to bios etc..

I had problem with bios last month. Get a new battery replaced by tech. But it did not resolve the issue. Next day i got that battery replaced with another and it worked. Not sure the old used to replace original was faulty or we have properly inserted. Anyway new battery fixed my issue.

When i had this issue, i if i don't switch off power to SMPS, CMOS did not lose the power.

 

[quicky008]

Looks like a faulty motherboard. I doubt that the CMOS cell would run out so quick considering that it is only used to maintain the state of the BIOS when the machine is powered off. Even then it could last years.

That's what i was afraid of-if the motherboard is indeed the culprit then i suppose there's not much i can do to fix this problem.Last night i replaced the existing battery on my motherboard with a new one.However on measuring the voltage of the older battery with a digital multi meter,i found it was at an acceptable level ie 3.3 V,which seemed really surprising as depleted batteries don't have voltages above 2.8 volts (or thereabouts).So was the problem really being caused by a weak battery or the motherboard itself is acting up?


Some websites that i visited earlier recommended upgrading the bios if changing the battery doesn't fix this issue-however i'm a little hesitant to do so as performing a bios upgrade is quite a risky business,but even then if doing so actually resolves this damned problem then i might give it a try.Do you think this issue might somehow be related to the bios and its solution may lie in upgrading it to a later version?

 

[Desmond]

You could try upgrading the BIOS though I cannot pinpoint what exactly is wrong with your motherboard.

Upgrading the BIOS only takes about 15-20 seconds. However, you get a powercut in that duration then your motherboard is permanently f****d. So, update at your own risk. You can mitigate that risk by using a good UPS.

 

[quicky008]

You could try upgrading the BIOS though I cannot pinpoint what exactly is wrong with your motherboard.

Upgrading the BIOS only takes about 15-20 seconds. However, you get a powercut in that duration then your motherboard is permanently f****d. So, update at your own risk. You can mitigate that risk by using a good UPS.

ok,since this is quite an old motherboard,i could only find windows based bios update utilities for this board at Asrock's website that are certified to work with earlier versions of windows (like vista,xp etc)-do you think they'll work without any issues on newer OSes like Win 8 or win 10?I currently have win 10 installed on this system.

 

[Desmond]

Since you are genuinely facing a problem then you might as well try that.

 

[patkim]

did this problem start after you upgraded to newer OS like Windows 10 or did it exist even before?

 

[quicky008]

no,it was there even when i used win 7