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Easiest way to do VGA to Text

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  Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-07-30 19:10 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2019-07-30 20:10 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2019-07-30 20:20 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com> - 2019-07-30 20:50 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-30 21:20 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2019-07-31 20:00 +0200
        Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-31 20:30 +0200
          Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Doug McGarrett <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> - 2019-07-31 21:40 +0200
            Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-31 23:00 +0200
          Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2019-07-31 22:50 +0200
            Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-31 23:10 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com> - 2019-07-30 21:30 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-01 19:00 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2019-07-30 23:20 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-01 19:40 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2019-08-01 19:50 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text rhkramer@gmail.com - 2019-08-01 20:20 +0200
        Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Paul Sutton <zleap@disroot.org> - 2019-08-01 21:40 +0200
        Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-02 14:50 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-02 14:00 +0200

#211924 — Easiest way to do VGA to Text

	I've been trying to do the impossible, more like the
impractical, for some time now so I need a knowledge infusion.

	I want to be able to read the VGA output of a computer,
do OCR on it and have ASCII text.

	As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
setup on it, etc.

	It seems as though we may have reached one milestone in
that one can buy a usb frame grabber that spits out UVC
webcam-style video.  The representative of the company which
makes the device  told me that most common flavors of VGA cards
produce signals that would work with the device but some odd-ball
cards won't work with it which makes sense.

	Assuming most will work, what one would have is frame
after frame of digitized video.  If this is a setup screen, the
only thing likely to be changing until you do something is the
cursor may be blinking otherwise, it's going to be pretty stable.

	You'd have one frame of video to do the OCR on and then
one does something such as hit the Tab or one of the arrow keys
and then you grab another frame and read it and so forth.

	Are there any free projects out there which take the raw
video as input and output text as output since the frame grabber
is just the beginning of the beast and then you have to convert
it to text and maybe some method of determining where the
highlight as in cursor position is so as to know what one is
about to select?

	Needless to say, but saying it anyway to avoid confusion,
one would have the frame grabber and text engine on a different
working debian computer since the sick one isn't capable of doing much
until the BIOS gets set correctly.

	I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
CDROM.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ

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#211927

Martin McCormick wrote: 
> 	I've been trying to do the impossible, more like the
> impractical, for some time now so I need a knowledge infusion.
> 
> 	I want to be able to read the VGA output of a computer,
> do OCR on it and have ASCII text.
> 
> 	As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
> most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
> servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
> when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
> powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
> setup on it, etc.

The parts that you will need:

- a video capture device. I don't know about VGA input, but I do
  know that HDMI video capture devices can be had for prices
  ranging from $25 to $250 or so.

- transformation from video to still images can be done via the
  package imagemagick

- OCR can be done with the package tesseract-ocr


In future, if you can arrange to buy used server hardware
instead of desktop-class machines, you'll have access to various
IPMI (DRAC, ILO) serial console systems which include BIOS
access.

-dsr-

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#211928

> 	As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
> most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
> servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
> when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
> powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
> setup on it, etc.

Actually, cheap little boxes like the BananaPi (and the legion of
similar SBCs) do output via a serial line, so you might want to try
that route.

They're also pleasantly low-noise and fairly power-efficient.


        Stefan

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#211929

On 7/30/2019 8:12 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> 	As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
>> most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
>> servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
>> when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
>> powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
>> setup on it, etc.
>
> Actually, cheap little boxes like the BananaPi (and the legion of
> similar SBCs) do output via a serial line, so you might want to try
> that route.
>
> They're also pleasantly low-noise and fairly power-efficient.
>

For a fanless solution the 'apu' from 'pcengines' are not that bad.

--
John Doe

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#211930

Martin McCormick wrote:

> I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
> debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
> to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
> brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
> reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
> the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
> drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
> in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
> the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
> floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
> CDROM.

I have not heard so far of working OCR free under linux. I would buy
commercial software that can work as screen reader. You can pipe the images
from the linux PC to that software and hear the text.

This is not only the OCR part, but also the reading and what I have seen
under Linux is all BS. There were very good projects 10-15y ago, but I have
not heard of a break through in any of them. For example ViaVoice a STT
program used to run on linux and was dropped when IBM and Phillips stopped
the project cause DARPA stopped the funding. Festival is good as TTS, but
is far away from commercial quality and so on. 

Making a good reader program is very complex and sophisticated thing and
there are many unsolved problems to deal with. This means you can not just
OCR the screen and dump it to the reader - you must preprocess it and often
go to semantics, which makes it pretty difficult.

If you have time to waste, keep us posted of your progress. Last time I did
research on the topic was 10+y ago, when I wrote my thesis on dialogue
systems, so please, correct me if I am wrong and if there is a useful
software out there. Honestly I doubt it, cause people massively got dumber
in the past 10y, of course except the readers of this list :)

best regards

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#211995

deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> writes:

> Martin McCormick wrote:
>
>> I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
>> debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
>> to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
>> brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
>> reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
>> the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
>> drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
>> in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
>> the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
>> floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
>> CDROM.
>
> I have not heard so far of working OCR free under linux. I would buy
> commercial software that can work as screen reader. You can pipe the images
> from the linux PC to that software and hear the text.
>
> This is not only the OCR part, but also the reading and what I have seen
> under Linux is all BS. There were very good projects 10-15y ago, but I have
> not heard of a break through in any of them. For example ViaVoice a STT
> program used to run on linux and was dropped when IBM and Phillips stopped
> the project cause DARPA stopped the funding. Festival is good as TTS, but
> is far away from commercial quality and so on. 
>
> Making a good reader program is very complex and sophisticated thing and
> there are many unsolved problems to deal with. This means you can not just
> OCR the screen and dump it to the reader - you must preprocess it and often
> go to semantics, which makes it pretty difficult.

I used tesseract-ocr, mentioned previously, a couple of years ago with
very good success.  Also, the problem he's trying to solve is much
simpler than the general OCR problem; he's got the actual correct pixels
(rather than a scan), and maybe even have knowledge of what fonts are
used.  That makes a huge difference.

> If you have time to waste, keep us posted of your progress. Last time I did
> research on the topic was 10+y ago, when I wrote my thesis on dialogue
> systems, so please, correct me if I am wrong and if there is a useful
> software out there. Honestly I doubt it, cause people massively got dumber
> in the past 10y, of course except the readers of this list :)
>
> best regards

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#211999

Joe Pfeiffer wrote:

> I used tesseract-ocr, mentioned previously, a couple of years ago with
> very good success.  Also, the problem he's trying to solve is much

what means very good success? You had to proof read it at the end - time
spent. For me either something works or it doesn't none of them worked even
close to good

> simpler than the general OCR problem; he's got the actual correct pixels
> (rather than a scan), and maybe even have knowledge of what fonts are
> used.  That makes a huge difference.
> 

I doubt it - really! Let me know at the end. I am curious.

regards

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#212006

On 07/31/2019 02:22 PM, deloptes wrote:
> Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
>
>> I used tesseract-ocr, mentioned previously, a couple of years ago with
>> very good success.  Also, the problem he's trying to solve is much
>
> what means very good success? You had to proof read it at the end - time
> spent. For me either something works or it doesn't none of them worked even
> close to good
>
>> simpler than the general OCR problem; he's got the actual correct pixels
>> (rather than a scan), and maybe even have knowledge of what fonts are
>> used.  That makes a huge difference.
>>
>
> I doubt it - really! Let me know at the end. I am curious.
>
> regards
>
>
Does your repo have cuneiform? I found that cuneiform works LOTS better 
than tesseract.
(You can find cuneiform in the rpmfind app, and convert it with alien if 
you can't find a deb version.)

--doug

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#212017

Doug McGarrett wrote:

> Does your repo have cuneiform? I found that cuneiform works LOTS better
> than tesseract.
> (You can find cuneiform in the rpmfind app, and convert it with alien if
> you can't find a deb version.)

Looks like it is 10y old already - as I said - all the investments in
research and development stopped around that time. And as I said I am very
sceptic - I mean compared to commercial tools all the sort of thing looks
childish. If you want to play and waste some time - good, if you want to do
a serious work - bad.

regards

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#212015

deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> writes:

> Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
>
>> I used tesseract-ocr, mentioned previously, a couple of years ago with
>> very good success.  Also, the problem he's trying to solve is much
>
> what means very good success? You had to proof read it at the end - time
> spent. For me either something works or it doesn't none of them worked even
> close to good

Yes, I did have to proofread, and of course that took time.  But if
you're setting perfection as the only acceptable performance level, no
OCR software will ever achieve it.  Human eyes don't meet that standard.

I wasn't keeping track of statistics (I wasn't conducting an experiment,
I had a pamphlet that needed to be recreated and then edited), but the
results were very very close to 100%  I certainly spent a lot more time
on reformatting and editing than I did proofreading.

>> simpler than the general OCR problem; he's got the actual correct pixels
>> (rather than a scan), and maybe even have knowledge of what fonts are
>> used.  That makes a huge difference.
>> 
>
> I doubt it - really! Let me know at the end. I am curious.
>
> regards

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#212018

Joe Pfeiffer wrote:

> I wasn't keeping track of statistics (I wasn't conducting an experiment,
> I had a pamphlet that needed to be recreated and then edited), but the
> results were very very close to 100%  I certainly spent a lot more time
> on reformatting and editing than I did proofreading.

ok but because you completed a simple task, you can not conclude it is
working good. I mean good for you. I have tried many programs. Couple of
OCR for example and I compared with commercial OCR. I tried festival,
viavoice and many others TTS and STT - nothing useful - just a prove of
concept or incomplete useless code. Yes it is useless compared to
commercial tools, so again if you want good results in this area it should
be commercial. It is interesting to know if something runs under linux.

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#211932

On 7/30/2019 7:01 PM, Martin McCormick wrote:
>
> 	I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
> debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
> to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
> brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
> reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
> the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
> drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
> in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
> the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
> floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
> CDROM.
>

Why not "simply" deconnecting the hdd  once booted reconnecting it?
Granted, it's clearly not ideal! :)

--
John Doe

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#212084

john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com> writes:
> On 7/30/2019 7:01 PM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> >
> >       I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
> > debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
> > to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
> > brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
> > reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
> > the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
> > drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
> > in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
> > the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
> > floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
> > CDROM.
> >
> 
> Why not "simply" deconnecting the hdd  once booted reconnecting it?
> Granted, it's clearly not ideal! :)

	I chuckled when I read your message.  Not because there
was anything at all wrong with the suggestion but because that
was the first thing I tried years ago when I stumbled across the
problem.  Since the boot drive  was disconnected, the computer
just gave me that nasty little double high-pitched beep which
says the game is over before it even started.

	It seems that there has to be a drive in place that would
boot if only it could.

Again many thanks.

Martin

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#211937

On 7/30/19 10:01 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	I've been trying to do the impossible, more like the
> impractical, for some time now so I need a knowledge infusion.
> 
> 	I want to be able to read the VGA output of a computer,
> do OCR on it and have ASCII text.
> 
> 	As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
> most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
> servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
> when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
> powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
> setup on it, etc.
> 
> 	It seems as though we may have reached one milestone in
> that one can buy a usb frame grabber that spits out UVC
> webcam-style video.  The representative of the company which
> makes the device  told me that most common flavors of VGA cards
> produce signals that would work with the device but some odd-ball
> cards won't work with it which makes sense.
> 
> 	Assuming most will work, what one would have is frame
> after frame of digitized video.  If this is a setup screen, the
> only thing likely to be changing until you do something is the
> cursor may be blinking otherwise, it's going to be pretty stable.
> 
> 	You'd have one frame of video to do the OCR on and then
> one does something such as hit the Tab or one of the arrow keys
> and then you grab another frame and read it and so forth.
> 
> 	Are there any free projects out there which take the raw
> video as input and output text as output since the frame grabber
> is just the beginning of the beast and then you have to convert
> it to text and maybe some method of determining where the
> highlight as in cursor position is so as to know what one is
> about to select?
> 
> 	Needless to say, but saying it anyway to avoid confusion,
> one would have the frame grabber and text engine on a different
> working debian computer since the sick one isn't capable of doing much
> until the BIOS gets set correctly.
> 
> 	I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
> debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
> to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
> brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
> reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
> the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
> drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
> in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
> the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
> floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
> CDROM.
> 
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ

What about using a computer whose CMOS Setup utility is accessible via 
the serial port?  This article indicates the Dell 2450 is capable:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/rhl-biosserial.html


David

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#212089

David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> writes:
> What about using a computer whose CMOS Setup utility is accessible via the
> serial port? This article indicates the Dell 2450 is capable:
> 
> 
> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/rhl-biosserial.html
> 
> 
> David
> 
> 

	Thanks for the information but None of the Dells I have
are that model.  They are all traditional eyeballs-only style.  I
even have a card that was manufactured many years ago that
replaces the VGA card in a number of PC models but not, of
course, the ones I have.

	I had bought it to use at work and it did work fine in a
system there but the card will not physically fit the connector
on the one system that has a removable video output card and the
others all have VGA integrated in to the mother board.

	You fight the war withthe weapons you have, not what you
wish you had.

	The other possibility touches on a comment that another
poster to this thread mentioned.

	I do own an iPad which has a commercial OCR program on it
that while driving one crazy with it's limitations, can sometimes
work quite well.

	If you use the iPad's rear-facing camera and shoot a
photo of the monitor screen, it sometimes produces useful results
but it is normally kicking and screaming every step of the way.

	The OCR program is really meant to photograph pieces of
paper under light that doesn't flicker.

	The monitor screen is a classic CRT which flickers at the
frame rate of 60 FPS with no setting to increase exposure time
which might solve the problem.

	I waited until night, clamped the iPad in to a tripod
fixture aimed at the CRT and observed that it continuously cycled
in and out of error mode due to the flicker.  A LCD-type monitor
might work much better as they have almost no flicker.

	This is definitely one of those projects in which one
must not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

	Thanks for the good ideas.

Martin

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#212090

Martin McCormick composed on 2019-07-30 12:01 (UTC-0500):

> 	I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
> debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
> to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
> brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
> reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
> the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
> drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
> in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
> the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
> floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
> CDROM. 

Are these old Dells continuously connected to power whether booted or not?

I have a bunch of old Dells. When left unconnected to power, some wear down the
2032 coin cell CMOS batteries with unusual haste. Once this happens and the
battery is replaced, reconfiguring the BIOS is required, unless 100% use of
defaults proves acceptable, which because of the date and time at least, for me is
never.
-- 
Evolution as taught in public schools is religion, not science.

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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#212099

On Thursday, August 01, 2019 01:49:34 PM Felix Miata wrote:
> I have a bunch of old Dells. When left unconnected to power, some wear down
> the 2032 coin cell CMOS batteries with unusual haste. Once this happens
> and the battery is replaced, reconfiguring the BIOS is required, unless
> 100% use of defaults proves acceptable, which because of the date and time
> at least, for me is never.

I know this is off point (because you are not the original poster, who, iirc, 
is blind or partially blind), but, if the only reason to reconfigure the BIOS 
is to set the correct date and time, an alternate would be to boot with the 
wrong time, then use, set the (software) clock to the correct time (possibly 
using the utility that syncs to the atomic clocks in Colorado or wherever, and 
then using  that other utility that lets you set the hardware clock from the 
software clock.

I forget the names of those various utilities ;-)

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#212107

On 01/08/2019 19:13, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, August 01, 2019 01:49:34 PM Felix Miata wrote:
>> I have a bunch of old Dells. When left unconnected to power, some wear down
>> the 2032 coin cell CMOS batteries with unusual haste. Once this happens
>> and the battery is replaced, reconfiguring the BIOS is required, unless
>> 100% use of defaults proves acceptable, which because of the date and time
>> at least, for me is never.
> I know this is off point (because you are not the original poster, who, iirc, 
> is blind or partially blind), but, if the only reason to reconfigure the BIOS 
> is to set the correct date and time, an alternate would be to boot with the 
> wrong time, then use, set the (software) clock to the correct time (possibly 
> using the utility that syncs to the atomic clocks in Colorado or wherever, and 
> then using  that other utility that lets you set the hardware clock from the 
> software clock.
>
> I forget the names of those various utilities ;-)
>

I think one is ntp (network time protocol)


Paul

-- 
Paul Sutton
http://www.zleap.net
gnupg : 7D6D B682 F351 8D08 1893  1E16 F086 5537 D066 302D

https://fediverse.party/ - zleap@social.isurf.ca

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#212146

rhkramer@gmail.com writes:
> I know this is off point (because you are not the original poster, who, 
> iirc,
> is blind or partially blind), but, if the only reason to reconfigure the 
> BIOS
> is to set the correct date and time, an alternate would be to boot with 
> the
> wrong time, then use, set the (software) clock to the correct time 
> (possibly
> using the utility that syncs to the atomic clocks in Colorado or 
> wherever, and
> then using  that other utility that lets you set the hardware clock from 
> the
> software clock.

	Raspberry Pi's do exactly what you are describing when
they run Linux.  They have no running internal clock so when they
power up, they can only reference seconds that start from 0 in
their timer register.  Instead of a big bang, we are talking
about a little pop.

	At some point, the Pi gets a network connection going and
goes out to pool.ntp.org where there are thousands of unix boxes
all over the world that can give you UTC or coordinated universal
time to within a second or so if you use a pool near where you
live.  Search for pool.ntp.org.

	Very briefly, servers connected to actual atomic clocks
are Stratum 1 servers.  You can even become one of those by
having your own atomic clock or by using a receiver that can sync
to the atomic clocks carried by such systems as GPS.  These are
incredibly accurate.

	For the rest of us, not trying to crowd source a radio
telescope or do some other task that requires accuracy to umteen
decimal places, ntpd can get you there to within a second when
configured correctly.

	Ntpd even has routines that check your clock against all
the others and add or delete fractions of seconds so the longer
your clock runs, the more accurate it gets to a certain point.

	If you do have a hardware clock, Linux automatically
updates it.  If you look at system shutdown messages, that's one
of  them as processes are being shut off.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ

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#212143

Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> writes:
> Are these old Dells continuously connected to power whether booted or not?

Yes.

> I have a bunch of old Dells. When left unconnected to power, some wear 
> down the
> 2032 coin cell CMOS batteries with unusual haste. Once this happens and 
> the
> battery is replaced, reconfiguring the BIOS is required, unless 100% use 
> of
> defaults proves acceptable, which because of the date and time at least, 
> for me is
> never.

	I know what you mean.

	Some time before I retired in 2015, we had a Dell server
at work that  must have had bad steering diodes somewhere on the
mother board because it could drain one of those 2032's in just a
few hours.  Nobody even knew there was a problem until it was
shut down for some length of time and then it would come up wrong.
Trying to remember what all happened is a bit difficult now but I
seem to remember that one could power it up and it would start
immediately for 10 or 15 seconds and then shut off at which time
one could press the Start button and it would run with all the
defaults.  Good servers just remember what power states they were
in when last shut down or maybe there is a BIOS setting that you
can set to determine this behavior but there is none of this
business of running for a few seconds and then going in to
shutdown.

	The department that actually owned the server decided to
replace it with a new one and that's the end of that story as far
as I can relate.

	The university would have put the defective server in
Surplus and state law required that it be sold at auction at
which point, some poor bloak would buy it and make the same
discovery we had made.:-)

Martin

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