Asus X52F Laptop - Random changes in date

I was recently asked to look at an Asus X52F laptop that kept changing the date to a random date between sometime in 2010 and a couple of months in the future. The time didn't seem to change just the date. This was causing problems when on the internet with certificate errors as the system date did not match what was being expected. 

This laptop uses the Asus K52 motherboard so the following could well be useful for other K52 equipped laptops.

First thing to check is whether the date that Windows is displaying is the same as the system date in the BIOS. Pressing F2 when starting takes you into the BIOS and the date shown there was the same as was shown in Windows. Reset the date to the correct date, press F10 to save and exit and boot into Windows and check the date. If all is OK shut down the laptop and go and make a nice cup of tea.

Now you are suitably refreshed, restart the laptop and press F2 to boot into the BIOS and check the date. If the date is incorrect you have the same problem as I had.

My first reaction was that the BIOS battery needed changing. However I was a bit concerned that it only seemed to be the date that was changing and not the time. Doing a bit of Googling it does seem to be a common problem. So the easy fix is to just put in a new BIOS battery and see what happens. Flip the laptop over, take off the access panel and look for five minutes trying to find the BIOS battery. No Battery to be seen. Hmmm.

Well there is a battery but it is not that easy to get to.

Update
If you are feeling brave check out the link at the end of the instructions

Toshiba P200D Laptop - No Wireless, sometimes!!

Toshiba Satellite P200D laptop that required a re install of Windows Vista. All done and tested, including SP2 update, and laptop given back to the owner. I received a phone call saying that they were unable to get the laptop on to the internet. Initial thoughts were that they were not inputting the correct wireless code to access their router as everything worked fine for me.

Visited the owner and sure enough the laptop would not connect properly. However their other laptop was OK, their Ipad was OK and my netbook would connect OK which had never been on their network.

The laptop was getting an IP address from the router which was the DHCP server. The router was saying that the laptop was connected as it was in the list of connected devices. However the laptop connection was saying that it was "Local" only and there was no little globe on the connection near the clock. You could ping the laptops IP address ok but if you pinged the default gateway (the router) laptop said there was no connection.

"My laptop won't turn on. Can you fix it?"

A friend with a HP Compaq CQ61 laptop had an issue with the laptop not turning on. They had given me a clue by saying that the charger did not seem to be working. However they had tried another charger from one of their friends that was supposedly the same model and it still didn't work.

So I plug the laptop charger in to the mains and then plug the charger into the laptop. Sure enough there was no life in the laptop. The battery had also run down so no blinking flashing leds, screens or anything.

Crack out the trusty meter and check to see if there was any volts coming out of the charger and going into the laptop. Nope there wasn't.

Do we have mains going into the charger? Change the meter to AC and measure the voltage. None again. Perhaps the fuse has gone. Unplug from the mains to check and..... well see for yourself

Total lack of the live pin on the plug. Well this will be easy, just change the plug.

Plug changed, does it work? No. Damn!

Zoostorm Freedom 10-270 - Hard Drive Removal and CMOS battery replacement

The Zoostorm Freedom 10-270 is a small netbook PC. A friend asked me to have a look at the 10-270 as the machine would not boot. After doing all the usual checks I decided that I needed to scan the hard drive to see if it was infected. I tried the Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper, loaded on to a USB stick, but it could not find the Windows partition so failed to load. I then decided that the best way forward was to remove the hard drive from the netbook and attach it to my desktop machine where I would be able to scan it easier.

I turned the netbook over to try and find the cover that was hiding the hard drive. None of the covers underneath  had a hard drive beneath them, oh dear! A quick Google led me to this page. So now I knew, to get to the hard drive you have to dismantle the netbook almost completely, oh deary dear!

So are you feeling brave? Then let us begin.
If your netbook is still in warranty then send it back and let them deal with it. If it's out of warranty and you have nothing to lose, have a go, it's the only way to learn you know!