BIOS Clock Not Running

[rhea]

Hello,

I have a 5 year old Compaq Presario V4000 laptop. I recently upgrade its RAM (PC4300) from 512MB to 2 GB. The upgrade went fine. The power supply brick was also giving trouble so I replaced that too and that too is working well. However, I noticed that after I changed these two things, the BIOS clock is stopped. When I boot my computer into Windows XP, it shows the time of last shut down and so does the BIOS. When I go into bIOS settings, the clock is showing the time the computer was last shut down and the clock is not running. I've searched all over the Internet and most common response is to replace the RTC battery but I highly doubt it is a battery issue, because if the battery is dead then the time gets reset to several years back and not the last time the computer was shut down. I can't understand what this could possibly have to do with memory upgrade and power supply brick change but it seemed to have happened since then. Any ideas as to what could be the cause of this and how to fix it?

Thanks!
Rhea

 

[aalokp]

When I boot my computer into Windows XP, it shows the time of last shut down and so does the BIOS. When I go into bIOS settings, the clock is showing the time the computer was last shut down and the clock is not running. I've searched all over the Internet and most common response is to replace the RTC battery but I highly doubt it is a battery issue, because if the battery is dead then the time gets reset to several years back and not the last time the computer was shut down.

I have the same problem. I have a Dell D830 (Intel ICH8 Southbridge chip) that resets to the previously set time after reboot. I too am using Windows XP, but I didn't do any major upgrades to the machine. I have also changed the battery. At this point, as long as I feed power from the AC power supply AND the OS is running, the OS clock ticks. However, in BIOS set up mode, you can see that the clock does not tick. In Diagnostics mode, you can see the entire diagnostic halt on IRQ8 - the real time clock. This all leads me to believe that the ICH8 chip is faulty (it does more than just the clock), at which point it is time to replace the motherboard.

I have a 5 year old Compaq Presario V4000 laptop.

Your Compaq Presario V4000 has an ICH6 Southbridge, I believe. I don't know if the Realtime Clock (RTC) functionality had been integrated into the southbridge by that point. I also read somewhere that it might be possible to upgrade the chipset drivers and/or flash the bios, but none of these are quick fixes, and they all sound like they will end up telling you to replace the motherboard, but with different levels of certainty.