Does anyone in the community have any thoughts on the life expectancy of the battery on the motherboard? My main desktop rig is a self-build and the battery is the usual CR2032. If the battery was getting low I don’t think I would get a warning. On one of my other desktops (an old Dell Optiplex) the BIOS gave me a warning. I would like a guess as to when I should think about changing the battery before I run into trouble. Any thoughts/opinions/experiences?
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If you hang on to hardware for an extended time, every 5 years.
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I’ve been fixing PC hardware since 1992. I have seen a huge variety of life times, and it comes down to the quality of the battery manufacture, and the length of time the mainboard is powered on. Leave it always powered it will last 5 years if a good quality battery (varta/everready). Otherwise it will last 18months or so.
Thanks for the info. All my machines are old by many folks standards but they serve my needs well enough and finances are never great really. 5 years was about how long the Dell battery lasted so that makes sense. I think I’ll set myself a repeating alert for about 3 years so I am well covered. The self-build rig is already “old” with an Intel Core i5 3570K CPU and other things from around that time but I really don’t feel the need for the “latest and greatest” until it starts to fade which it hasn’t yet! 
Thanks @onyxnz. I always buy good batteries for everything. Cheap ones are false economy. Seems like 5 years is a good yardstick.
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there’s not much that would go wrong when the battery dies. it’s just a bios reset to safe defaults.
I mean if you preemptively change the battery you would still get a bios reset. so why not just wait until the battery dies and take that as an alert for the need of changing the battery?
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