What does the 3 volt laptop battery do?

[ericmark]

It would seem it holds the date, I have replaced it, a small button cell and now the date does not need resetting every time I boot up the laptop.

However the laptop had become very slow, I was thinking it was getting updates once it realised it was not 2004, the question is will it now speed up? Or is there something else wrong?

Used as a dumb terminal to access the desk top it works well, but try to use firefox direct rather than firefox on the desktop accessed through laptop and very slow.

So what does the battery do, and is the speed likely to get better as it updates things?

 

[bernardgreen]

The 3 volt battery supplies power to the real time clock and volatile RAM memory ( to make it "non" volatile ) while there is no mains power.

It might speed up as there are several parameters stored in the "non" volatile RAM and the clock generator frequency might be one of those parameters.

 

[Doggit]

As the computer was getting slow before you changed the battery, although you may need to go into the setup to change some of the parameters, it's more than likely that you're runnning out of space on the computer as well. Sorry Bernard, but the it's the NVR that holds the date and time and the other setup parameters, but you almost got it right.

Sometimes it'll be pressing F2 as soon as the computer starts that gets you into the setup routines, and there you can check things like the memory latency and the CPU clock speed etc, but unless you know what are the best settings, it's not good to mess around with them.

 

[bernardgreen]

Sorry Bernard, but the it's the NVR that holds the date and time

volatile RAM memory ( to make it "non" volatile )

NVR = Non Volatile RAM

 

[Doggit]

You got me Bernard, I think I just had a senior moment mixing the two, but the date and time along with all the setup paramters are held there. God, it's been a long time since I've messed around in a setup routine.

 

[bernardgreen]

I just had a senior moment

I know the feeling .......They come when one is old enough to have acquired a wealth of useful experience.

 

[Doggit]

Except I think I may have peaked, and be starting to lose it all.

 

[ericmark]

It does seem to be improving, had the main laptop battery been OK there would have been no problem, but that has also come to end of life, the laptop is mainly used to scan pictures, I have two Canon scanners both which will only work with 32 bit, so this laptop is still running Vista so will still run the scanners, my main laptop had a double hard drive failure both the solid state drives failed so I lost the operating system, so after replacing drives it went to Windows 7 which in turn resulted in not being able to use either scanner.

So the old Vista laptop was brought out to run the odd things I could not do with main one. However in the past there has been a problem with the display so I realise it is not really worth spending money on a new main battery, so am hoping changing the button cell is enough to keep it running.

Both laptops can be used as dumb terminals to control desktop, never seem to have got the remote desk top to work other way around, the Windows 7 laptop remembers all the login details, I just click on the icon and it connects, however the Vista laptop with the bad battery has never remembered the login details even though the remember thing has been clicked, I hope now it will remember but not tried to connect twice yet so don't know.