My clock was slowly losing time. Now it is losing a lot of time. Restarting resets the clock to the current time. Over the last couple of days I have noticed all programs opening slowly. When typing an e-mail, I will have to wait for the letters to show up on the screen. That also is remedied by restarting. Is it possibe for a weak battery to cause all of these problems???

Thanks

"Restarting resets the clock to the current time."

I've never seen this symptom before. The system clock is powered by the cmos battery. These are (re)charged while the system is on. Once they start to fail (won't hold the proper charge anymore) cmos/bios settings can start to wander. The clock, hard disk parameters, etc.

Is this a desktop machine or a laptop?

No, this isn't a battery problem. Like Dan Penny suggested, the clock wouldn't fix itself by switching off the system - the time difference would continue to get worse and worse.

There could be a number of causes for this problem. It could be hardware-related (memory, processor or even the motherboard or hard disk) although it's interesting that you've only seen it get very slow over the last couple of days - hardware issues often appear gradually. Try copying a very large file or folder (something that will take about 5 minutes) and then do your normal stuff such as writing an email at the same time. Is the problem REALLY bad when you do that? If so, it could well be a hardware problem because it isn't transferring data between your system's components as quick as it should be.

It might also be a software-related problem. Do you have up-to-date anti-virus software? What about a firewall or anti-spyware program? Get those programs to check for updates on the Internet and then scan your system for any viruses or spyware problems on your PC that might be trying to collect information from your PC and send it out over the Internet.

There's a thought actually - unplug the Internet, switch on your PC and then see what it's like as another test.


P.S. Although a lot of people overlook them because they are such old basic tools, running Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter can work wonders on PCs that have got slow. To run these, go into Windows Explorer or My Computer, right-click the C: drive and select Properties from the menu, then click the Tools tab

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