[TheForge] Computer Question (OT)

[Dick Snow]

At 09:58 PM 12/18/2004, you wrote:
>Hi
>Any one familiar with a error on boot up;
>CMOS - Checksum error
>
>I pressed F1 and it continued to boot up but I think I have to feel daring 
>to re start it again
The CMOS is a chip on the motherboard that is backed up with a battery. It 
contains the date, time, and hardware related information about your 
computer. It knows what size hard disk you have, whether you have a floppy 
disk, etc. It also contains settings that can make your computer NOT work. 
It has settings for CPU and RAM voltages, and BUS speeds for the CPU and 
RAM. It has information about the boot sequence; ie: floppy, hard disk, CDROM.

A Checksum error can usually be caused by one of three things:
1) you changed some hardware
2) the battery backup has died and all the settings were lost
3) some software you were running crashed in such a way as to scramble the 
CMOS settings.

You need to press the F1 key and go through all the screens and make sure 
all the settings look ok. If you don't know what a setting does, its 
probably best to leave it alone. There is usually a default for each 
setting and there may be an overall key to set ALL the defaults.

Things to look for are whether the amount of memory is being correctly 
calculated and whether the cpu is showing up at the right speed. If your 
system seems to be working, and the date and time are correct, then you are 
probably ok. If the system defaulted back to basic settings, your system 
may not be running at its original optimized speed.

If you have questions about what individual settings should be, just post 
back here. It sounds like there are enough geeks here to answer any 
questions you might have.

Once you are done checking the settings, make sure to SAVE and EXIT. That 
will cause the checksum to be recalculated and written back to the CMOS, 
thereby getting rid of the checksum error message.

Hope that helps!

Dick M. Snow (Dick.Snow at POBox.com)
Datalytics, Incorporated
Efland, NC