Date and Time change after a reboot

[grshpr]

I have had 2 machines recently that have had date\time changes after a reboot of the OS. The operating system in WEPOS (stipped down XP).

What I am seeing is an eventlog entry for the Event log service being shut down (time is correct), then the next entry for Eventlog (multiprocessor free, etc..) shows up with the date 12:23 AM 3/23/2006, then the very next enry shows up with EventLog of 5:00 PM 12/31/1969. It's the typical 3 consecutive eventlog entries that you see during a regular reboot.

From this point, what is weird, is that some events are posting as year 1969, and other as year 2036. If the date was correct, the order of the events would follow what I would expect normally. Also, I have noticed that once a peson actually logs onto the PC with a local user account, the date sets to the correct day, but in the year 2106.

I can manually set the year back to 2006, and everything is fine, but with a major roll-out of over 4000 of these same PC's this year, I'm a little concerned that we may have a big issue. Right now I have about 120 PC's, and 2 have had this date\time issue of those 120.

Any ideas about what the issue may be would be greatly appreciated.

 

[cdogg]

That is strange indeed, but could be a sign of a bad quartz clock on the motherboard. The CMOS battery is responsible for keeping time while the PC is turned off. Windows (any version) will read the time from the quartz clock at startup. XP has the internet time synch option, though I'm not sure why it was setting it to 2106!

So what I would do is check to see what the time is reported in the BIOS right after rebooting the PC. If it is incorrect, change it to the correct date/time. Immediately power off the PC after exiting the BIOS and leave the PC unplugged for a few minutes. As soon as you turn it back on, go into the BIOS without giving Windows a chance to load.

If the time is showing OK, then you've likely got an OS problem. If not, well then it is either the battery or the motherboard.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
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