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PSA: A dying CMOS battery was faking a dead motherboard on 3 machines last month
Heads up for anyone doing bench work, I got burned three separate times in the last month by machines that looked totally dead but were not. Each one would power on with fans spinning and no display, and my first instinct was the board or the CPU. A guy I used to work with at a shop in Reno told me to always pull the CMOS battery and read the voltage before I call anything dead, and he was right twice out of the three. The two bad ones were reading under 2.4 volts, which is low enough to stop the board from posting at all on some older boards. Swapped in a fresh CR2032 for about a dollar and all three booted straight into BIOS the same day. I almost quoted two customers for full board replacements over a battery that costs less than a candy bar. Has anyone else seen a low battery kill POST completely, or is this just a fluke with the cheap boards I keep getting?
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