Grab your milk and cookies. Today's Tech Tip is more of a story. It is told by one of our inSync readers and has a pretty obvious moral at the end. Enjoy.A while back I started having some major computer problems. I first encountered problems in August, when I attempted to duplicate a CD. As the CD writing software copied the disc image to the hard disk, my computer suddenly rebooted. And this happened every time, through about 5 attempts. So I ran scandisk, defrag, viruscan, and other system maintenance procedures. I also found that the same thing happened whenever I attempted to copy a large file from a CD, even in Windows Explorer--so I knew it wasn't a software problem, or a problem specific to my CDRW. I also encountered similar problems while editing large audio files, and during bootup, including unexpected reboots, freezes, and crashes. Finally it got to the point where my system was completely unusable, so I formatted my hard drive, installed a new version of Windows, and re-installed the hardware. After about a week, the problems came back.I went through a hardware troubleshooting procedure, by disabling all the hardware I could in Control Panel-->Device Manager, then enabling one piece at a time and booting, until a failure occurred. In this manner I traced the problem to my SoundBlaster Live! So I replaced it with an SB16 PnP ISA, and the problems went away for a time. I also got in touch with Creative technical support. Convinced it was a resource conflict, I went through numerous procedures to alleviate the conflict. Around the end of October or early November, I started having the same problems with the SB16 that I'd had with the SBLive. So I completely removed them both. Then I started having the same problems with my on-board IDE controllers, and other hardware. I figured it was time for either a new motherboard, or new RAM, or a new hard drive.Finally, towards the end of December, unable to use my computer for anything other than surfing the net and playing solitaire, I noticed that my PC's clock wasn't keeping time when my computer was turned off (i.e. when I turned it on in the morning, it showed the same time as when I turned it off the night before). On a hunch, I checked my CMOS battery, and found that it was outputting 49% of nominal output. So I replaced it in the middle of January, and all the problems immediately went away, after 6 months of frustration.The moral of the story: sometimes the little things we hardly think about can be the source of unending frustration. And it's hard to believe that such an innocuous little part as a 3V lithium battery can cause such major (and often intermittent) problems, and do so without making the system completely inoperable; but apparently it can.Jesse Cian Fawcett