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Chris asked: “I have a question about a laptop that doesn’t seem to hold the time, on the bottom corner. Everything I’m reading seems to point to a BIOS problem. Is there a way I can test my BIOS or my CMOS Battery to see if that’s the problem before I open up the laptop?”
Chris, it definitely sounds like a CMOS battery problem, if your computer is a few years old it may have still come with BIOS firmware instead of the newer UEFI firmware, and it would still be using a battery.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to check the battery other than to test it with a voltmeter (it should read 3V), and to do that you’d need to open up your laptop, and if you’re opening it up anyway you might as well replace the battery whether it’s dead or not.
The way to tell that the battery is need of replacing would be to run into the exact symptom you’re running into, though, so it’s a good bet that you need to replace it.
The battery isn’t technically necessary of for the computer to run
The battery isn’t technically necessary of for the computer to run, but you will have to manually set the date and time each time you turn it on, if you try to ignore it and don’t set the correct date some security certificates may refuse to let your computer access some secure applications. The easiest path will be to replace the battery.
However, before you spend a ton of time tearing the laptop apart, let’s ask what you mean by not keeping time? Do you mean that when you shut the computer down and start it up the next morning, the clock hasn’t advanced much past the time you shut it down?
Because if the clock is off by a neat number of hours, your computer might have the wrong time zone configured in its operating system. We’ve seen Windows machines inexplicably return to Pacific time zone after years of living happily on the East coast.
We suspect it has something to do with the feature where Windows tries to decide what time zone it’s in by what IP address it was given. That’s a less than perfect science, sometimes. So check that before you go cracking open cases.