As the university prepares for the return of in-person classes for the fall semester, some of the staff and faculty have started to trickle back on campus. But there’s a problem: their computers have been turned off since pre-pandemic, some 16 months earlier. No issues with the iMacs as they work fine once plugged back into power. The Dell PC towers, however, aren’t so convenient.
PC motherboards have a CMOS battery that provide just enough power for the board to remember its settings. If the battery were to run out of juice, say, during a pandemic when the PC is without power for more than a year, the motherboard is effectively reset. This becomes a problem when users boot it up for the first time in a long time, as the internal BIOS clock will be incorrect (and won’t boot further with an incorrect time), and also the hard-drive won’t be recognized.
Our department will then get the call and we would have to physical go to these users’ offices to replace the CMOS battery, and toggle everything back as it were. Tedious. Why can’t everybody use Mac computers to make all our lives easier?
Once we get the PC (and Macs too, honestly) back up and running, there’s another problem: the software is horrendously out of date. Performing updates to the apps and the operating system is at least another few hours. God forbid your PC is old enough to have a spinning hard-drive instead of solid-state; it’ll take the entire work-day for everything to sync back together and working correctly.
Solution? Well, let’s first agree to not have another pandemic. Then, opt for a laptop next time you’re given the option of a new work computer.
Happy dragon.