For those of you using older computers...... Please Read!

Been there, done that.

Sometimes the battery is a LOT of trouble to get at. Especially if the machine is newer and more compact. My 12 year old HP tower with 3 hard drives and 2 DVD/CD drives has clear access to most of the MB. My wife's HP Slimline is almost impossible to get at the MB without removing a lot of stuff. Major disassembly just to replace HD.

The battery was never supposed to be replaced - the machine was supposed to die long before the battery. But I don't dump PCs just because they are old either. If they serve a purpose offline I keep them running. Don't need to update the OS at EOL either. I suspect my 12 year old W7 machine will last another 5+ years after I take it offline.

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I have a old PC (IBM) that I still use running DOS on it for some of the software that I still use!

I'm retired from IBM and bought my first pc (IBM, of course) in 1982. The employee purchase price was, if memory serves, $2400. Man, it was fun. I wrote a bunch of useful programs in BASIC. Talk about memories.

Phil

Three month ago I junked a 13 year old computer. The battery was still good, but other components were in the process of failing. Bought a new replacement computer.

Great news that the battery held out for so long.

Keep 'rm runnin' like a top, geaux computon' taters!

I built my own computers and added on more memory and newer graphics cards their 11 and 9 years old when the cmos battery starts going out it usually starts losing the date then what drives to boot off I made sure I left the battery open so I could get at it easily so far only had to replace one of them.

with products designed to fail just out of warranty ... planned obsolescence. I still own a couple of Palms and a Psion 3mx ... I dont use them that often any more though.

The battery in a laptop is backup. That is, it supplies the CMOS if the main battery is dead or removed. So, in most situations it is the shelf life of the CR2032 that determines when it will die.

Is the "standard" corporate laptop that gets given to like 10,000 employees, today in 2019, is as good as my personal ThinkPad core i7 T450s that I bought myself and still use, from 2015. That I do consider progress. No more of this your laptop is your status monkey business lol

And, not to mention any names, the new ones start with the letter after C, and have 4 letters ending in LL.

The old ones were utter junk, and had two letters, first one after G, and last one after O. Constant problems. Expensive. Bad support.

p.s. the standard corporate laptop which is the equivalent of an ultra book barely costs $1000 today. I am not trying to be funny, it is value and helps employees to be more productive.

about cars. Something 10-15 years old is now well behind the times though it still gets you from A to B, just less bells and whistles

I drive a used Lexus, 2006. It was mfg 9/05 so over 14. There are cars on the internet that have as high as 1 mil. miles, I first found one online that had 986k. Mine has about 130k and people say reaching 300k is like shooting fish in a barrel. Everytime I rent a car for work I realize wow is my stuff outdated. I tell my buddy and he says I'd rather be outdated than have a car payment.

So I look at my 2019 work computer, and my 2015 personal computer, and say, why would I personally buy a 2019 computer? What is it that my 2015 ThinkPad cannot do? It's core i7 and 1920xblahblahblah....

p.s. the original owner of my car has "home" labeled in the gps and his house is over 5 mil. lol I guess after owning it 8 years it was time for him to move on. But he did have it 8 years, not 36 mos....

Easiest to just pull the battery and look. Most old CMOS batteries are the same. You will need to pull it to replace it anyway so just pull it to begin with and then you can see what battery to buy.

Yeah the good ol' desktop. Try replacing it in one of the newer laptops with plastic clips and no screws. SUCKS.

I had to use DOS to run a calibration Program for a Tektronix waveform monitor....via an RS232 port. Took a bit of doing, but I found a disc image of DOS that would run off a Burned CD.
All I had to do was make DVD drive the first option in BIOS boot order... which I left after changing as it only delayed boot for a second or two....
Fortunately the computer only had system driver updates via floppy disk, and Floppy gave me I/O and storage for the calibration program...
Probably will be the last time I use DOS... but once configured it was relatively painless... Relatively....

Most DOS commands are still available within Windows so I'm a bit surprised you needed to go to the steps you did. There is also a utility (free) called DOSBOX that might have worked. See https://www.windowscentral.com/dosbox-windows-10

Good suggestion thanks

On a few occasions I have needed to run an old DOS 8 bit program that won't run on Win 10. I found a DOS emulator called vDOS that seems to work pretty good.

My response is based on two assumptions. First, do you use Linux? The Second, are the DOS batch files using syntax compatible with BASH? If the two conditions are met, this could be a viable option.

Third, yes I know I said two, there may be Linux programs available in the cloud that meet your specifications, however low that probability is.

I've heard good things about Linux but to be truthful for some of us old timers (I don't buy green bananas) that are comfortable with DOS I don't see the need to explore a new O/S for the sake of an 8-bit DOS program.

One of my older laptops used mostly for testing or miscellaneous tasks is a 2008 model. I just had to replace the battery in that earlier this summer. That has lasted well over ten years, but the main battery hadn't lasted more than about 4 or 5 before the laptop switched status as "small desktop" as it must be plugged in all the time now to operate.

Cheers

I used to do this a lot! Extending the life of my older PCs. But I got too addicted to building new ones!

I still use my old Apple ][ on some occasions. It's made of individual socketed TTL IC chips, so it's easy to fix when needed. I just wish I had put the money into Apple stock back in 1977 instead of buying the computer...