CMOS settings altered and cannot shut down

[Julie Meikle]

Hi,

Trying to help out a friend who opened an email a few months ago......PC
crashed and they now have to shut down by turning power off (!).

No doubt this continues to cause further problems.

They get a message warning of changed COMES settings at start up.....it
seems to have altered the date and the CPU speed. The PC then is
temperamental and the mouse jumps all over the place. It will connect via
AOL to internet but on trying to download an anti-virus package it cuts the
connection and will not download.
I also tried to reinstall windows ME (over the top just to see if it made
any difference) but it gave the message saying it could not check the hard
disk.

I will need longer to try to fix it for them, but is the best method to
reformat etc, or does anyone have an idea what it could be, and a solution,
please?

Hard to tell after this time what was caused initially, whether it was not a
virus & another defect 9(e.g. internal battery?) and what has been caused by
countless "improper" shutdowns!

Thanks

Julie

 

[Jonathan Clements]

Hi Julie,

I doubt it's a Virus problem. More experienced computer persons than I
may offer differing opinions than mine, but as I read this post, I'm gonna
give you my 2c!

The BIOS, in short, checks the hardware in the machine, and sets up all
the interrupts and addresses for applications later on. It then attempts to
find boot sectors from the disks in the order given. I'm probably not 100%
right on this one, but I don't believe the BIOS opens itself to run time
interrupts (unless it's flash upgradable) - I'm not sure about Win ME, but
NT onwards won't alllow that to happen without explicit user instruction.
And I think, pretty much most flash upgradle bioses, are dual-bioses...
meaning, that you can revert if it doesn't work.

Have you tried resetting your friends machine to have more acceptable
BIOS parameters? In short, I don't think it's an OS or a Virus problem.

Just my 2c,

I'm sure you'll get a more useful post later,

Kindest Regards,

Jon.

 

[mitundergrad]

Hi,

Trying to help out a friend who opened an email a few months ago......PC
crashed and they now have to shut down by turning power off (!).

No doubt this continues to cause further problems.

They get a message warning of changed COMES settings at start up.....it
seems to have altered the date and the CPU speed. The PC then is
temperamental and the mouse jumps all over the place. It will connect via
AOL to internet but on trying to download an anti-virus package it cuts the
connection and will not download.
I also tried to reinstall windows ME (over the top just to see if it made
any difference) but it gave the message saying it could not check the hard
disk.

I will need longer to try to fix it for them, but is the best method to
reformat etc, or does anyone have an idea what it could be, and a solution,
please?

Hard to tell after this time what was caused initially, whether it was not a
virus & another defect 9(e.g. internal battery?) and what has been caused by
countless "improper" shutdowns!

Sounds like your friend's CMOS battery is dying or dead which would
cause the system, at bootstrap, to lose all prior settings (system
clock defaults back to BIOS default date, no detected
harddrive(s)/floppy drive(s)/CDROM(s), CPU speed wrong, etc.)