Originally Posted by WillowTheWhisp (Post 443632)

Originally Posted by blazey (Post 443637)

not changing batteries in the remote is just lazy though to be quite frank!
A better tip is to put batteries that no longer run a remote efficiently in a clock, as a clock can still get months of life out of them.

Originally Posted by blazey (Post 443594)

Small watch battery type thing thats held in place in two clips. You pull it out with a knife or a flat headed screw driver carefully and it resets the BIOS, so it resets your time and everything so to speak.
You shouldn't do it on a regular basis but it helps normally for bad shutdowns like the one the threads about.

Originally Posted by entwisi (Post 443693)

You'll find that they aren't very easy to get to on laptops though. It is quite a scary task trying to dismantle a laptop (I've been building/mucking about with PCs since my 286 with 1M RAM) as they have more tiny screws than a don't know what. Some 'good' manufacturers provide a small flap that you can undo to get at them but the vast majority don't.

Its actually perfectly OK to do this as often as you want as long as you can be bothered to set the BIOS up again. You should consider that there is a lot more in a BIOS than date and time, get it wrong and that shiny wizzy bang system will not perorm to its best which is a complete waste of money. Come to think about it no-one performs system tuning any more, we used to do all sorts of 'tweaks' to squeeze a little bit extra oomph from our PCs, you lot nowadays are spoilt rotten with oodles of spare CPU/memory Unless of course you've installed Vista :D )

I doubt this will fix it for HR though. The fact that shes booted the initial stages of windows and it reboots from a BSOD suggests windows itself has had a hissy fit. It could mean that there are some bad sectors on her hard drive that are starting to fail and this is causing teh problem, I know her 'friend' has more than half a clue so he will no doubt check for stuff like this anyway

Originally Posted by harwood red (Post 443640)

thanks all for comments, the battery pack isn't in blazey it was plugged into mains...spoke to friend (who won't charge me a penny) and he is going to sort it wednesday...don't worry he has said about removing everything first before resetting (computers are his livelihood too)...and yes ian it does have the licence sticker on the lap top for windows so we're ok there.

thanks once again :)