Basically around the 2000s we had a WinXP computer and each time I wanted to use it, either my mom or my dad had to turn it on. However they had to strike the key to enter the BIOS. Everytime when booting the PC. Then they would exit the BIOS and so Windows XP would boot normally.
Do you guys know if your parents also did that and why?
It’s possible they had a dead BIOS battery, and whenever they had to boot up, they had to reset the BIOS clock, or the system would go haywire thinking it was Jan 1, 1992 or whatever the default date was.
That is the answer.
Some boards will prompt you to press the key to enter the BIOS as the only option when the CMOS battery is flat. Whether or not you set the clock, you still have to enter the bios to boot.
The battery is a standard CR2032, so it's easy to replace, but it's not something that most people experience, so it's not common knowledge.
Personally I went about 6 months doing the same thing before I even bothered googling "how much does a CMOS battery cost" because it was an old pc anyway.
Some boards position their battery in really awkward and annoying places that force you to remove components to get to it. A real pain... don't make me remove the CPU cooler just to get to the battery... >.>'
Bios was not set up correctly, or it did not detect the keyboard and was set to fail into bios in that case.
There was no real standard of behaviour that was adhered to for early PCs, so different hardware acted very differently. Standards that were adopted like USB were often implemented in incomplete or incompatible ways.
