Sony laptop time bomb - won't boot with today's date

[unifex]

Well, the problem has nothing to do with Windows 7, but I so got used to this Forum being the main resource of computer wisdom, so here it goes:

I have an old Sony laptop (PCG-VX89P is the model number). It worked very well for a long time (real 8 hours battery time) but eventually it was getting slower and slower, until at some point it simply refused to boot.

I thought the problem was with the hard drive, so I used the Spin-Rite to "repair" the drive, reinstalled Windows (yes, it's XP) and ... it still won't boot. it gets to the welcome screen, then I click on the user icon, it shows Desktop for a while, then the BSOD and it restarts so quick, I can't say what's written on the blue screen at all.

I thought the thing was done for. But, busy as I am, it was gathering dust for some time, until recently I decided to sell it for parts as an alternative to throwing it away. But having forgotten what the real problem was, I decided to boot it up and erase the hard drive again.

Of course the laptop's battery was drained completely, I had to plug it in and the BIOS screen appeared asking me to set the clock. I ignored it, since I did not care to use it, and miraculously everything worked - the machine booted up nicely, worked fine. OK, I thought, I'll change the time to normal, did it in Windows, and then rebooted - and it won't boot!

Next day I recall that this time change was the only thing I did, so I got into BIOS and changed the year to 1992 - the laptop boots up nicely, just complaining that the date is wrong before showing the Desktop.

So here's the summary of the trouble - the laptop boots OK and works OK if the date in BIOS is set to 1992 or anything thereabout, while with today's date it shows BSOD right after the first glimpse of the Desktop (and after that goes on the unending circle of rebooting).

Anybody heard anything like that? Some battery going bad? I'm kind of puzzled by this.

 

[seavixen32]

You could try replacing the CMOS battery.

How to Remove a CMOS Battery From a Sony Vaio Laptop | eHow.com

 

[badger906]

If the cmos battery was flat then all bios info would be forgotten upon each boot.

Boot it up enter msconfig and click the start up tab. Untick all boxes and then restart using todays date. If it doesn't BSOD then its obviously a start up problem.

Upload your BSOD dump file and we can see what's causing the BSOD on startup. For further info on what's needed head to the debugging section at the top a pinned thread

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