Solutions: It's time to replace dead battery

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 1, 2001

Q. I shut my PC down after I use it. The battery for the clock is dead. Lately, I have been getting this messages on boot-up: "Warning 0206: Real time clock error and 0200: System CMOS checksum bad -- Default Configuration used" and "0207: Previous boot incomplete -- Default configuration used. Press F-1 or Esc to resume, F-2 to setup." What do I need to do to delete these messages?

A. It sounds as if your motherboard's onboard battery is dead and needs to be replaced. Check any documentation that you have regarding your motherboard -- most can be found online at the motherboard vendor's Web site -- to see what the replacement procedure is. If you are not comfortable working inside your PC, take it to a shop. If the motherboard has a replaceable battery, the price should be just a few dollars.

Keeping the system tray clean

Q. How do you stop the system from putting programs into the system tray?

A. Most applications that put themselves in the tray area (typically the bottom right of the display) have an option that turns this functionality on and off. Double-click (or right-click) the particular tray icon to see if there are options or preferences to do this. It seems every application you install wants to put an icon in the tray area; it's an annoying trend. Not only does it clutter your tray area, it also takes up memory resources. In the cases where the application does not offer an option to turn this functionality off, you may need to disable the application from starting in the first place. Click Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, then System Information. From the Tools menu, click System Configuration Utility. The different tab will contain the applications that start from the various startup points in your system. Find the offending application and deselect it.

Monitor's last message

Q. I have a new computer with Windows Me. Before completing shutdown, a blue screen with this appears: "HF 61.9 KHz VF 138.0 Hz." It disappears very fast. What does it mean?

A. Your PC must be powering off before the monitor does. Once the monitor stops sensing a signal from the PC, it is quickly displaying its horizontal and vertical frequencies. Those are the numbers you see.

Device driver conflict

Q. This message occasionally appears on our screen when we start the computer: "Terminating thread due to a stack overflow problem. A VXD, possibly recently installed, has consumed too much stack space. Increase the setting of MinSPs in system or remove recently installed VXDs. There are currently 5 SPS allocated. Press any key to continue." What does this mean?

A. This error occurs when Windows encounters an internal overflow of the stacks used by 32-bit Windows device drivers. Stack overflow conditions normally indicate errors in a device driver (device drivers are system level programs that control individual devices on your system such as video, sound, mouse, etc.). The stack pages referred to in the error message are special areas of memory, each 4 kilobytes is size, used by device drivers to do their work. It sounds as if one of your device drivers is buggy. Increasing the stack pages by adding the following line to the [386Enh] section of your system.ini file may solve the problem: MinSPs=6

However, you may want to check the versions of your device drivers, starting with whatever you added last. You can check versions by right-clicking My Computer, Properties, Hardware, Device Manager, then highlighting each device and choosing Properties. Windows Update will probably not find an updated driver and you may need to go to the specific vendor's Web site to check for the latest version of the specific device driver.

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