Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text
Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> writes:
> Are these old Dells continuously connected to power whether booted or not?
Yes.
> I have a bunch of old Dells. When left unconnected to power, some wear
> down the
> 2032 coin cell CMOS batteries with unusual haste. Once this happens and
> the
> battery is replaced, reconfiguring the BIOS is required, unless 100% use
> of
> defaults proves acceptable, which because of the date and time at least,
> for me is
> never.
I know what you mean.
Some time before I retired in 2015, we had a Dell server
at work that must have had bad steering diodes somewhere on the
mother board because it could drain one of those 2032's in just a
few hours. Nobody even knew there was a problem until it was
shut down for some length of time and then it would come up wrong.
Trying to remember what all happened is a bit difficult now but I
seem to remember that one could power it up and it would start
immediately for 10 or 15 seconds and then shut off at which time
one could press the Start button and it would run with all the
defaults. Good servers just remember what power states they were
in when last shut down or maybe there is a BIOS setting that you
can set to determine this behavior but there is none of this
business of running for a few seconds and then going in to
shutdown.
The department that actually owned the server decided to
replace it with a new one and that's the end of that story as far
as I can relate.
The university would have put the defective server in
Surplus and state law required that it be sold at auction at
which point, some poor bloak would buy it and make the same
discovery we had made.:-)
Martin
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