PC losing time

[timskipper]

A friend of my wife's has a PC running the feeder on his pig farm (so quite important!) but he told me yesterday that it's losing time badly - up to 6/7 hours a day now.

From my distant memory of such things could it be the CMOS battery in need of replacement? Or some other potential problem?

[Fidgits]

its obviously been abducted by aliens..

[onlynik]

Yes cmos battery.

You can download an app which will check and change the time from windows here

http://www.worldtimeserver.com/atomic-clock/

[timskipper]

Thanks. I don't think the pig sheds have internet access though!

[onlynik]

timskipper said:

Thanks. I don't think the pig sheds have internet access though!

Poor pigs, how do they waste their days?

Wireless

[simba1]

timskipper said:

A friend of my wife's has a PC running the feeder on his pig farm (so quite important!) but he told me yesterday that it's losing time badly - up to 6/7 hours a day now.

From my distant memory of such things could it be the CMOS battery in need of replacement? Or some other potential problem?

In my PC I have noticed there still is some power (power light remains on on the card reader)to the motherboard after a soft power off. Just thinking if the PC has a similar motherboard, there should be enough power to keep the CMOS battery topped up even after shutdown.

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

simba1 said:

In my PC I have noticed there still is some power (power light remains on on the card reader)to the motherboard after a soft power off. Just thinking if the PC has a similar motherboard, there should be enough power to keep the CMOS battery topped up even after shutdown.

Most CMOS batteries are just watch batteries these days so die after a while regardless.

[Scraggles]

just replace it, costs a few quid and and are easy to flip out and swap over, do it with the PC off though

no need to d/l a prog to tell u what you know and can see

[arclight]

simba1 said:

Just thinking if the PC has a similar motherboard, there should be enough power to keep the CMOS battery topped up even after shutdown.

Agreed, if there is power to the machine, then there should not be timeloss due to faulty (exhausted) CMOS. It might be something else.

One way to check for the CMOS is to literally remove power (not sure how practical this is in this instance) for a short time (24+ hours?), and see if the PC loses date and and time when it powers back on (make sure you take a note of BIOS settings).

HTH.

[Morningside]

Some BIOs have a system heath check built in and can show the voltage of the battery.
IS it overclocked?
What operating system is it running?

Still recon battery - But do all OS's ALWAYS read system time from the clockchip or from software timing?

[buggalugs]

Suspect options for internet time sync will be limited in a pig shed, so I'd just replace the cmos battery and take it from there.

[bigdods]

If the power is turned off at the socket and the CMOS battery is flat it will lost time. Tell him to leave it switched on at the socket and just turn it off using the normal pc power switch. That way the motherboard will continue to be fed power even with the pc off and it will keep time. The CMOS battery is only used when the power is turned off at the socket.

[timskipper]

It's never turned off - it's used to control the automated feeding of thousands of pigs!

[arclight]

timskipper said:

It's never turned off - it's used to control the automated feeding of thousands of pigs!

Assuming it's critical, and I am overly curious, what is the redundancy should the PC go phut?

[timskipper]

I should imagine the square root of FA, electronically. A man with a wheelbarrow otherwise or something similar I expect.

Farmers don't generally think like IT geeks.