Our third Q & A of the week comes from Percival via the PCstats reader feedback page . If you have a question you need answered right away, try our friendly forums for help.

Q: What should I do? I unwittingly (experimentally) enabled the cpu fan "detect cpu fan speed" from the default setting "disabled/off" to the "enable/on" mode on my motherboard; it does say that in the event that fan speed detected is abnormal, that there will be a short beep and the cpu will halt. On my system running an athlon 750 MHz, it did exactly just that and now I am locked out completely from the cmos setup. I can't find a jumper to return the CMOS to its default setting. If I power-on the system, it just beeps accordingly and shuts off. What should I do?

The most likely problem here is that your CPU heatsink fan is running at a speed (RPM) that your motherboard considers dangerous. This does not mean that the fan is actually defective, since many newer heatsinks with larger fans spin at a slower rate yet move as much if not more air than their smaller equivalents. It sounds like you are using an older motherboard which may not recognize these speeds as valid, especially since it was probably designed for Athlon/Athlon XP+ processors which run extremely hot.

The best thing you can do in this situation is to remove the CMOS battery (the small silver disk) from your powered off computer with a pen or other implement and wait for about 10-15 minutes before putting it back. This should reset your BIOS (and the 'detect CPU fan speed' value) back to the default values.