Had a week where every single PC I touched had a dead CMOS battery

Five machines in three days, all with the same 3.3V reading on the multimeter. What are the odds of that happening, and has anyone else run into a batch of bad batteries from a specific supplier?

3 comments

3 Comments

josephmartin18d ago

Five machines in three days, all with the same 3.3V reading" That's wild. I've seen a bad batch before but nothing like that many in a row. Did you check to see if they all came from the same box or supplier?

nora11018d ago

Hey @josephmartin, did you ever try swapping the power supplies from a working unit into one of the duds? I had a similar run with some boards once, and it turned out the whole batch of PSUs was putting out a steady 3.3V but couldn't handle any load, so swapping parts got me sorted.

blair_martin18d ago

Five machines in three days, all with the same 3.3V reading" reminds me of something that happened to my buddy Dave last year. He got a pallet of power supplies for a small server refresh, and six out of eight were dead on arrival. He pulled one open and found the exact same capacitor was bulging on every single board, like they came from the same bad production run. Turns out the distributor had a whole shelf of them from the same batch and just kept shipping them out without testing. Dave spent a whole weekend swapping caps before he just gave up and demanded a full refund. The supplier tried to blame him for "improper handling" until he sent them photos of the capacitors all looking the same.

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