First post, by James-F
- Rank
- Oldbie
I want to share a noob story.
For two days I was tearing my hair out because my secondary Pentium machine will not POST half of the time and sometimes boot but crash at Win98SE loading screen, or when loading a Game.
So I started playing with the CPU and BUS voltage jumpers, clearing the CMOS, tried different HDDs, different IDE cables, different CPUs, different GPUs, I even disassembled the system to pieces and rebuilt it, I probably power cycled the system around 150 or more times.
I was about to give up and throw this machine up the attic... then at the lowest point of my frustration I measured the CMOS Battery. 😐
The CMOS battery was at 2.1v so the system was at a tipping point where it sometimes POST and other times not, and when it did POST it crashed in software.
I changed it less than 1.5 years ago...
The Socket 7 MB is old enough to not give any warning about the battery voltage.
I urge everyone with similar POSTing problems to check the battery FIRST and spare yourself some pain.
I was majorly relieved when I popped a fresh battery which measured 3.2v. 😀