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    Help! strangest time issues ever after teardown and rebuild

    Discussion in 'Alienware M11x' started by nkarno, Dec 29, 2013.

  1. nkarno

    nkarno Notebook Guru

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    Hello all, I have a r2 and I recently did a full teardown to blow the dust out. Everything appears to be operational after rebuilding but I am getting some strange time/date issues now in windows 7.
    I checked the BIOS time and date and that is right, but most of the time when the system boots windows says it is April 4, 2010. A few days I gave me a date in 2019! It seems to be jumping all over the place....

    I would suspect it would be the BIOS battery although that initially reverted, it has held the correct date. I read that this might require a re-install of Windows! I tried stopping and restarting the time service.
    Also on a side note the screen keeps going back to the lowest brightness setting. I turn it all the way up and have it set in control panel (and alien command center) never to dim on battery or plug and it still dims after a few minutes.
    I am not sure if that is related or not.

    Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
     
    nkarno, Dec 29, 2013
    #1
  2. IrkenLurker

    IrkenLurker Notebook Guru

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    Yeah, time/data issues are almost always related to the CMOS/BIOS battery. I'd hope buying a new one would simply fix that problem.

    As for the brightness issue, I'm gonna bet that that's a conflict between Windows and command center trying to control the computer's settings. I've had the problem a long time ago, but fixed it by uninstalling command center (fusion?) or disabling it from startup.

    Hope you can get your laptop back up to the way you want it!
     
    IrkenLurker, Dec 29, 2013
    #2
  3. nkarno

    nkarno Notebook Guru

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    fixed
    it was the CMOS battery!
    I didn't buy a $40 dell replacement though, I just bought a battery and carried over the wires and electrical taped it all up.
    For reference, dell using a CR2032 battery. a 2pack is like $5 bux
     
    nkarno, Dec 30, 2013
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  4. jimbob83

    jimbob83 Notebook Evangelist

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    Electrical tape may not hold for very long and you may get an intermittent connection with the battery. Do not solder the wires to the battery directly because those batteries contain lithium and could possibly explode. A better solution may be to buy a replacement CR2032 on ebay with the wires already attached. These are available for many different computers, if you can't find one for your particular model you could try one for a different machine, then if the plug doesn't fit your motherboard just splice the wires with the old plug to the new battery.
     
    jimbob83, Dec 30, 2013
    #4
  5. Alienware-L_Porras

    Alienware-L_Porras Company Representative

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    I'm glad you were able to get it fixed with that.
     
    Alienware-L_Porras, Jan 2, 2014
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