PC problem.

googling shows an ASUS FAQ where the 2 pins are marked CLRTC and not CLR_CMOS as Gigabyte uses. It's at the bottom right of the board, next to another row of headers.

Has it got a beeper on board, or a speaker connected ... sounds like faulty CMOS, you did say you'd replaced the coin-cell?

I repaired my old yoga s1 a few weeks ago, bought a second hand MB off ebay,

easy,

Plenty on aliexpress and alibaba for similar prices.

That would be a mad approach compared with a pcie serial card.

I bought from Scan. Not only are they a mail order company, but they are only about 12 miles from me and have a full walk-in shop there and I am also about 6 miles from Aria. There was no mention of a serial port on Scan's website, although it is mentioned on the manufacturer's site - and it is definitely there, as I was surprised when we found it!

I have only used an external, USB video capture card. As for sound, I only use the PC sound for trivial things, so I have never needed a decent audio card.

SteveW

It's getting harder to find socket 939 boards these days and it'd be pricey to upgrade, as you'd need new processor and memory as well (and you'd have to watch out as many motherboards are dropping straight PCI slots now).

It cost around £425 for my son's Ryzen 5 3600, MSI A470 Gaming Plus motherboard and a pair of 8Gb DDR4 memory sticks. He only got it as it was his 16th birthday, he'd just passed his GCSEs and I could have the old motherboard, AMD FX8350 processor and DDR3 ram, so offsetting the cost a bit.

Used was probably your best bet.

SteveW

By removing/replacing the battery, I can already get to the BIOS page and click on restore defaults. But as soon as I save the BIOS setting,,back to the fault condition.

Found the CMOS reset jumpers. Same result.

There are specialist cards that were only ever made in PCI variant.

In the day, I use to edit up things on the PC and transfer to my 360 systems Shortcut for playback at a later date. Being able to plug any bit of audio gear in and outs easily was very useful.

The used MB arrived this morning from Ebay. More quickly than expected at £40 including postage.

Just about to fit it.

It came with posh looking 1M of HyperX memory. Old board had 2M of whatever.

I'll see how it goes as is.

But that is a straw man, The man wants a single serial and parallel port

Seems to be working OK. Although lots of updating of drivers etc going on.

But plenty of serial ports in pcie format.

Your best bet if you want a simple life and don't need too many PCI slots is to look for something secondhand from the likes of Morgan. Corporate boxes with PCI in the i7 3770 series are relatively cheap.

Big ugly ones go for lower prices but are quite rare. Most are SFF or USFF (the latter lacking enough expansion slots).

Dave seems to have fixed the problem by buying a similar motherboard ...

But for how long. ;-) Googling shows this particular MB has a fair share of problems.

When I had similar problems with two (different) Asus boards, I switched to AsRock (though I gather the former now owns the latter) and no problems since, have received BIOS updates for about 5 years (mainly due to spectre microcode fixes)

I'll keep that in mind since none of the makes really means much to me anyway. Except from recognising ASUS.

The original likely did some 10 years plus. A long time these days.

If you are running W7 then a new M/B is one of the things that might cause issues with m$soft, unless your copy of W7 was a full retail version.