The clock on my pc has just been reset?

Brendan Burgess

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Just checked the time and my pc says it's 8.48 am. It's got the correct date.

I certainly didn't make any conscious effort to change it.

It was correct last Sunday morning after the clocks went back.

I presume I can fix it easily, but is there any good reason why this would have happened?

Brendan
 
it may be your regional settings Brendan, it might think you are in a different time zone.

Or the setting that adjusts the time automatically for daylight saving time has been turned off
 
The CMOS battery is gone on my old PC, I have to reset the date and time after every unplug.

In your case just the time reset? Could be the start of a failing CMOS or a virus?
 
Could be the start of a failing CMOS or a virus?

I ran Avast just to check for a virus, and it is clean. Would a virus not mess up the clock generally and just reset the daylight saving time.

What is the CMOS and what other symptom might there be? Do I need to take any preventative action in the meantime?

Brendan
 
Thanks mathepac

So that is the most likely cause.

I am not really comfortable opening up my pc and messing around with motherboards. I can live with a wrong clock.

Could it cause any serious problems?

Brendan
 
The date was correct so it's not the CMOS battery. Likely just some quirk with your time/timezone/daylight saving settings. Just have a look at those.
 
When you send emails, what time/date appears when the chain-mail is printed? What time/date appears for emails being received in your Inbox listing?
 
The only problem with it not giving the correct time would be if you send something that might be needed at a future date to verify time. Other than that?
 
There is an option to manually set or reset the Date and Time on a computer, irrespective of operating system, whichever of the various flavours of Windoze, Linux, macOS it runs. There is also an option to automatically sync the date with a central server for each time-zone. Here is a set of instructions for yours and to keep it in sync with daylight saving time and so on.

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000554.htm

@Brendan , rather than rooting around with the physical internals of batteries and motherboards, etc, can you leave your PC switched on or at least leave it attached to a "live" mains outlet, both of which will preserve the date and other settings.

If the CMOS battery dies, other settings would be lost too and the computer would boot into set-up mode, prompting for settings. I don't believe it's the CMOS battery is the problem.
 
When you send emails, what time/date appears when the chain-mail is printed? What time/date appears for emails being received in your Inbox listing?

I clicked on it earlier and the clock seemed to be showing the right time.
I rebooted my pc and it has been correct since.

The time on emails sent and received seems to be correct.

Brendan
 
My PC has done the same thing today, jumped forward one hour. There were some updates yesterday, AVG and Windows, perhaps this affected the clock.
 
Windows 10? If so maybe go into Settings -> Time & Language -> and turn off setting Time/Time Zone/daylight saving automatically, instead setting the time manually (check that the Time Zone is set to Dublin (UTC+00:00). This should work around the likely cause highlighted by Leo.
 
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