1100 - plate assignments/bottle fillings lost w/ power cycle

[Trishia]

Agilent 1100 HPLC (close to 20 years old); modules inter-connected with CAN, DAD detector connected to PC through G1369A interface LAN card. Quite a while ago, noticed that the plate assignments for the autosampler and the bottle fillings for the pump were not being kept into memory when power cycling the HPLC whereas they used to. There are onboard batteries on the boards in the modules, but it's a bit suspicious that two of them would have died around the same time so I'm just wondering if anyone else has any other ideas of what else I could check; I've already tried cold booting the modules to no avail and I can't test the batteries unless I disassemble the stack and open the relevant modules and would prefer to have the batteries in hand before doing so. I did not opt to do a firmware update at this point since the last updates were performed when we did a major software update and given it was working for years with those versions, I'm hesitant to think that would resolve anything - I'm currently running CDS Chemstation C.01.07 (SR2) and the firware revisions appear to be A.06.10 on the modules (with autosampler having A.06.37). Sort of assuming it's the batteries, but just thought I'd post in case I'm missing something that might end up being less disassembling.

[bunnahabhain]

I would suspect the batteries, even if two modules show this behaviour at nearly identical time. It is impressing how precise the manufacturing even of consumer grade batteries is: At my home, the smoke detectors (7 in total distributed in the house) had their "end of battery life" alarms on six subsequent days, after about five years of operation. All during the night, of course. In one night, two within two hours. This was a funny week.
Best regards
Jörg

[Trishia]

Yeah I kind of figure it's just an unlucky coincidence but wondered if I wasn't missing something. I'll report back if/when I get to it.