Maximum PC

Hi there!

I'm in a little rut here. My CMOS battery seems to have died yesterday, and I have yet to buy a replacement. However, whenever I try to shut down Windows Vista, I can hear the motherboard shut down but then it powers on again.

Is this connected to the CMOS battery dying? I've checked the registry, virus scan logs, device manager status, and all seems normal.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Much thanks!

It very well could be. The reason for the battery is to keep the BIOS chip on when the power is turned off so that the nonvolatile data stays stored and the RT clock can stay on. It could be something else though. Has anything else happened recently?

As long as power is being fed to the the computer/main board, data for the BIOS will still be stored even if you remove the CMOS backup battery. Even when the PC is not on, the 5v rail is still supplying power to the board for some features like wake on lan. It sounds like you have some sort of short or something that triggers a restart...

Looks like a corrupt operating system to me. I would run the hard drives diagnostic on it and see if it is failing.

Nasty

You're both right.

The battery is dead when it forgets settings for the BIOS. That BIOS holds all basic info for the entire system to start up and is held up by a simple button battery. I'd say it's the battery if it defaulted all settings and started over, or I'd say the BIOS is corrupt if some funky stuff comes up on the screen during POST. None of that so far.

What do you mean by "image". The computer is POST'ing, but it's saying something about "Image"? Vista runs, but it's only on start up that you get this "image" mystery. If you installed from a disk to a physical hard drive you would go right to this. If you mounted a Vista image in some method, you don't have a valid Windows install that's on a hard disk.

I don't have a great love of Vista, crashes everything I run...but it POST's and BOOTS every time. Maybe something in the BIOS about boot order, but I'm ascared of the "image" thing you're vaguely mentioning.

Get the Vista disc, have it in your hand, or I'm out...