We lost power on Friday evening and just had it restored late last night.  In anticipation of the outage, I shut down my Dimension 8300 completely, turned off my battery back-up and unplugged everything from the power source in the wall.  The computer was operating fine when I shut it down.

 

When power was restored, I waited until I knew it would remain on, then plugged in the wall outlet, turned on the battery back-up, then powered up the computer.  The Dell splash screen appeared, but then a black screen came on with a message reading that my CPU battery was low with instructions:  press F1 to continue, F2 for setup.  I pressed F1 and Windows loaded.  The date was wrong (it read September 17, 2003, 8 AM), Windows went through a series of recognizing "new hardware" and "drivers" and then ran fine.  I reset the date and time and restarted the machine.  The same error message appeared, but the current date held.

 

Could this be related to my complete loss of power, or do I need to have the battery replaced (and what does that entail, and how soon do I need to have this done)?  The computer is running fine this morning -- all programs operational, all peripherals recognized and operational, and obviously internet access (my only reliable means of communication now) is also operational.

 

Thanks for any advice.

 

Mary :)