What utilities exist for creating a CMOS backup under Windows XP?

My understanding is that the settings contained on the CMOS chip will disappear if the PC motherboard’s battery needs to be replaced.  Therefore, having a CMOS backup and a way to restore the CMOS settings can be beneficial.

Thank you for your assistance.

Pleonasm

I used this utility for my system when I replaced the battery:

BIOS 1.35.1

But, if you replace the battery quickly (it took about 15-20 seconds for mine), the charge is maintained and I did not have to do a restore.

NightOwl, thank you for the reference.

For the interested reader of this thread, additional CMOS backup utilities may be found at http://sac-ftp.externet.hu/utilmisc6.html and http://lists.gpick.com/pages/CMOS_Tools.htm.

Perhaps the most ‘professional’ of such utilities is WinRescue (http://www.superwin.com), a tool that provides CMOS backup functionality together with other troubleshooter/crash fixer options.

How do you know if your battery needs replacing?

A story is told of the early days of manned space flight....  The Americans spent millions of dollars inventing a pen that would work in the weightless of space.  The Russians used a pencil.

The morale of the tale is that sophistication does not always make a superior solution.  To backup my CMOS BIOS settings, I simply copied them onto paper.  Low-tech, yes; but effective.

Total investment of time:  less than 30 minutes.  Now, if I ever need to restore those settings for whatever reason, I'll be prepared.

Pleonasm

Here's another possible low tech solution if your computer supports this--one of mine does--the other doesn't:

When I boot and enter the BIOS on the sytem that does support this, I can use 'Print Screen', and it prints out what's shown on the screen.

On some screens, the information requires more room than fits on a single screen--so here I print the first part, then scroll so the next part shows, and then 'Print Screen' that second part, etc., until I have all the various pages.

On my system, two screens fit per printer page--then I force the page to print and eject with the printer's eject page button--I do this so information does not overflow onto a second page of a single 'pinrt sceen' page.

I was very unhappy when I discovered my second computer did not support the 'print screen' within the BIOS  :( !

DaddyO


Quote:

How do you know if your battery needs replacing?

My clock started loosing over a half minute per day!

I've seen reports where the BIOS settings are lost from boot-to-boot, and have to be reset upon re-boot.

Back when I had the CUSL2 mobo:

http://cusl2.radified.com/

.. there were some problems I could only fix by yanking the battery (looks like a thin nickel). I recall I had to remove the battery for 15-45 secs in order to reset to defaults. It was never exactly the same. Sometimes 15 secs was enough. Other times, 30 wasn't enough.

I came to the point that I always left it out for 2 mins .. that always cleared the old settings.

The good news is that, if you hurry, and can charge the battery in less that 10 secs, you stand a good chance of not having to reconfigure your mobo settings.

I love to get in there and play with BIOS settings, but this can sometimes lead to trouble.

Speaking of which, I just flashed the firmware on my new wireless router (Linksys WRT54G) yesterday .. and had to reconfigure everything. =/

The big question is: How long are the mobo batteries good for?

Quote:

When I boot and enter the BIOS on the sytem that does support this, I can use 'Print Screen', and it prints out what's shown on the screen.

I think this will only work with parallel printers, not USB.

Like Pleonasm, I myself wrote them down. This took about 30 minutes, but is worth it.

Rad wrote on Jul 18^th, 2005 at 1:17pm:

Speaking of which, I just flashed the firmware on my new wireless router (Linksys WRT54G) yesterday .. and had to reconfigure everything. =/

Just curious: what version did you flash it to, and why?

(Last yr I flashed my WRT54G with a wifi-box 2.00.8 version, and love it.)

v4.00.7 = the latest

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?childpagename=US%2FLayout&packedargs=c%3DL_Download_C2%26cid%3D1115417109974%26sku%3DWRT54G&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper

Quote:

Speaking of which, I just flashed the firmware on my new wireless router (Linksys WRT54G) yesterday .. and had to reconfigure everything. =/

I have a Linksys WRT54GS router. I flashed to firmware 4.50.6 today and found I couldn't access the internet whenever the wireless card was enabled. The Internet Gateway would just disappear. The Internet Gateway would reappear when I disabled the wireless card and used the wired connection.

I gave up and flashed the previous firmware, 3.37.2, and it works again.
To answer Dan Goodell,

Quote:

and why?

"No good reason".

Some see a newer firmware version and ask, "Why?" .. I see one and ask, "Why not?"  :)

Ditto .. for no good reason .. just to do it and maybe learn something in the process .. which I did .. which was "don't flash unless you have to".

Rad


Quote:

"don't flash unless you have to"

But look at the version history and they tell you at least some of the reasons they released the updated version--seems worth the effort!

I'm in the 'see a new version--why not!!!' category  :D !

Yes, I'll try the next firmware when it's released. Too hard to resist.

Did you get your new firmware working Rad? I didn't.

Okay, thanks.  I was just curious if there was a particular problem you were trying to fix by flashing.  I subscribe to the "if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it" philosophy, but there were several issues with the Linksys firmware I wasn't happy with.  (My WRT54G is 1-1/2 yrs old, so i don't know how different the most recent firmware versions may be.)  I tried all the official firmware versions that were available at the time, but it was a breath of fresh air when I switched to using non-Linksys, open source firmware.

I switched to the wifi-box firmware (sourceforge.net) and finally got proper PPTP VPN passthrough--the official Linksys versions never seemed to handle the GRE 47 protocol reliably.  With VPN passthrough that actually works, I can access my home LAN from any internet connection anywhere using just what's built into Win2000/XP, without requiring additional hardware or software.  That's very handy when I'm out in the field somewhere and need to grab a file from my home computer.

Open source firmware also adds features I didn't find in any of the official versions I looked at.  It added advanced wireless options like antenna power, a bigger wireless MAC filter list, and even a one-tunnel VPN server.  (The VPN server actually seems to work, though I'm not using it since I'm using a Win2000 machine as my VPN server.)  Ironically, I also have a BEFVP41, one of Linksys's official VPN routers, but I've never managed to get the VPN part of it to work.

Another very useful feature of the wifi-box firmware is what they call "static DHCP", which combines the best parts of static IPs and DHCP-assigned IPs.  With this feature, you let the router act as DHCP server, but can designate what IP you want it to assign to specific MAC addresses.  Sure, you can always assign static IPs with a regular router, but then you also have to manually assign the rest of the numbers (gateway, DNS servers), and you have to configure each machine.  This static-DHCP concept allows you to manage IPs in the router and lets the machines still pick up the other numbers from the DHCP server.

http://www.goodells.net/dan/wrt54g-staticdhcp.gif

Why do I even need static IPs?  Because to have port forwarding work (e.g., to use one machine as a VPN server) you need the machine to get a known, unchanging IP.  And to use network printservers, you need the printserver to get a known, unchanging IP.  On my home LAN the printers are not physically connected to computers, they are directly connected to the network via inexpensive D-Link DP301U and Hawking HP1SP "pocket printservers".