mobo battery changing

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A question for all you qualified techs, in the A+ book by Mike Meyers he suggests when changing a battery on the motherboard you can leave the computer switched on so as to save the settings in the BIOS, my question is this do techs really do this? surely the risk of ESD is not worth it,also if you do do it should you wear an anti static wrist band (surely not i would think).

 

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Personaly I'd never change anything whilst the PC is still turned on.

 

Mike said that ???

 

Actually this is possible. So long as you are careful the battery can be replaced while there is power to the mobo and you wont lose the bios settings.

However, i would not recommend it except in the most dire of circumstances. For one your putting your hands in a piece of LIVE electrical equipment... Even a small shock can cause harm (like when you jerk your hand back and slice it on the open case side, like i've done before!) And for another, normally you need to use something to help prise the battery out, and whats the 1st thing most techs have to hand? a terminal screwdriver...So theres always the chance of a slip and the shorting something on the mobo!

Of course on older mobos the battery used to be soldered in so just try doin that with the power on!!!!!!

 

yes, you can do it but i would say not to. you usually have a few seconds before all is lost anyhow

 

Stay on the side of caution on this one.You probably know,from your book,that an ATX mobo will retain a 'trickle' voltage to the motherboard whilst being supplied power from the mains lead,even though the power to the pc has been turned off (soft off ).Replacing the battery with power on seems a little daft given the fragility of some of those components!

I don't recall reading this in the book,but then I'm trying to soak up 1108 pages of information (D-Day beckons...eeek!)...

 

I can't recall ever having the need to swap out a battery while a PC is still switched on. At the end of the day it's a pretty quick and easy job to change the settings of the bios back to what they were before you swapped the battery.

If you were to go ahead and do this the only actual risk as I see it is the possibility of an electical short of some type (as Twizzle mentioned). As for the risk of a shock from the PC, well I think it's fairly minimal myself, I have had my hands in countless PC's when they are on and never got a shock yet, but I suppose it's better to err on the side of caution.

 

I do recall the statement of making notes of BIOS settings being mentioned on more than a few occasions in the Meyers tome..!