Flash memory in motherboards?

That would be a waste of money (something MB manufactuers are loathe to do). The battery is needed anyway for the RTC. Keeping an additional chunk of RAM alive is virtually free. What do you suggest, an expensive double-layer capacitor? Flash would also be less approprate than EEPROM technology.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I thought EEPROM was more expensive than Flash. Oh well... my information must be out of date.

Thanks for the reminder re: the RTC...

Not out of date. It *is* cheaper for *large* memory sizes, but...

Of course some settings *are* stored in flash, in a sense, since the factory default settings are part of the BIOS program, which is generally stored in flash these days. One could write a BIOS to store the settings in the large program flash, if it has the ability to boostrap, but that could result in a dead motherboard and an angry customer if the power failed or a crash occured during the routine writing of values, so I think most engineers will not be overly eager to invite that kind of problem to the door. Even if it happens only rarely, it's an extremely serious problem to the user.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Not to mention that you would lose the 'discharge CMOS' option with a jumper ! An invaluable aid.

Graham

One could argue that even the RTC is almost not needed in most desktop PCs now, they could get the time direct off the Net. Then you do have some savings - no pesky battery, and no CMOS ram.

You're assuming everyone's connected to the 'net' !

Graham

I expect functionally PC-like thingies (perhaps thin clients on wireless mesh networks) may well go that way.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

As if anyone cares about wasted memory in the PC world.

--DF

I have not noticed any video cards which use 1G of memory where a mere

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

And you think that all those 64M bytes are being used? Hardware guys put on enough memory so software guys have plenty to waste.

--DF

If you object to the coin cell, remove it and wire in a series pair of AA cells (assuming the coin is 3v, of course). The last time I did this mod was in 1999, to an IBM PC-AT. BIOS was still fine yesterday when I used that machine to assemble some MC68705 code.

-- Michael

Agreed. Heartily! That breed of assumption is too common, causes no end of frustration/problems. Of the half dozen PC's I use, only one ever connects to the web.

I might just do something along those lines.

My NEC 486 laptop's lithium battery's shot, and the battery in my Pentium II-366 MHz laptop is starting to go on the fritz...

On a positive note, though, I finally got my PII laptop to remote-control my main desktop machine last night (using vnc... that Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection didn't work for me)

- Another Michael ;-)

If you're running Mac OS X or Windows Vista then you probably are using a good chunk of it.

Tim

Say it isn't so! When you run Unreal Tournament 2004 or Quake 4, that GB of video ram can come in handy!