Another bios battery tale.

I visited my cousin today after two years without seeing him because of the CO19. I spent some hours trying to get his desktop pc working properly. I was forwarned of its problems and got him to buy a cheap 240 Gb Kingston SSD to fit in it. I took with me some sata cables and a power adaptor cable just in case, plus a 3.5 to 2.5 adaptor and screws.
The pc was working, but at 1/20 of the expected speed. The first thing I checked was the hdd, a 500 Gb WD blue, but it only had about 90 Gb used up. Looking inside was not pretty so we took it down to his garage and blew out a mass of dust with the airline before doing anything else. I fitted the SSD no problem and managed to download mini tool partition wizard 10, the idea being to reduce C drive to 200 GB and then copy it to the SSD. This took about 2 hours and then I found that there was no getting into the BIOS using the DEL key, even after checking the Asus website to make sure that was the correct button. A last resort was to check the CR2023 cell and found that it was dead. A new cell and I could get into the BIOS, set ACHI but there was no way to change the boot sequence, so I had to swap the sata leads giong into the motherboard. MTPW confirmed that the SSD was now the boot drive and I disconnected the WD drive and optimised the SSD and things speeded up to normal for the low end pc. The WD drive has been made one partition and reformatted as the data disk. The other week, I posted about a pc with a duff BIOS cell, but that one would only get to the opening page for the motherboard. You would think that the symptoms would be the same.

" You would think that the symptoms would be the same."

Not at all, almost every PC I have seen over 30 years has different symptoms. BIOS and now UEFI have changed over the years. Different between manufacturers, hardware, and the suppliers of the Firmware.

With any PC over 5 years old it is a standard servicing task.

I think I had better check out the Asus AM3+ motherboard that I replaced last year because it had strange fault symptoms.

I seem to have got into a BIOS nightmare lately.
I have just put together a part new pc for W10 which can be made compatible with W11.
The build is:

Gigabyte A320M-H
Ryzen 3 3200G
WD Black M2 500Gb
2 x 4Gb Corsair 2400 ddr4

Switching on to get into the bios, the system locks at the Gigabyte front page. This has the usual buttons listed to reach the bios.

I have tried the following:

2 different USB keyboards plugged in both USB 2 and 3 sockets.
A ps2 keyboard. All the keyboards appear to work, num lock and caps lock are indicating as expected.
I removed the CR2032 and it is reading 3.15V.
With the power off, I shorted the clear CMOS pins as per manual, and there is no jumper fitted or supplied with the motherboard.
I made sure the centre contact for the CR2032 is sprung well for good contact.
All 3 fans work, the power light works, reset button and main switch work. The psu is a new Be Quiet 400W semi modular 80+ gold.

I would have thought that if there was a significant fault there would have been no screen image at all.

Are you able to use a higher powered PSU ? 400w is a little on the low side for today's equipment.

Got it going today. Having nothing to loose, I reseated the cpu, ram and removed and replugged in the power connections to the motherboard and it went into the bios. Tomorrow I will load and update W10.
As the total power consumption of thei system is only about 100W, I thought a 400W psu would be perfectly adequate. I got a G model APU to avoid the bother of a separate GPU.