Re: [OxLUG] Date reset after reboot

A.E.Lawrence wrote:
> Jamie Lokier wrote:
> > A.E.Lawrence wrote:
> >> I have seen BIOS settings corrupted (checksum failures) with a flat
> >> battery. But if you are getting past a cold boot, I guess that cannot be
> >> your case. But you are probably running with BIOS defaults which just
> >> might mean less than optimal memory settings and the like.
> >
> > I think nowadays they often use flash for BIOS.
>
> The board that gave me a corruption was using flash for the BIOS itself:
> indeed I took the opportunity to re-flash to a later version while I was
> changing the battery. But it seemed to keep the user settings in
> volatile memory: maybe they thought it better than re-flashing a whole
> block for a few bits? The board was only around 3 years old.

A different type of flash can be used small stuff - those small serial
chips with just a few pins, and can rewrite individual bytes using I2C.

But I don't know that all motherboards use it, instead of
battery-backed RAM. I just don't see what the point of the latter
would be these days.

-- Jamie