The date on my computer show January 2000. When I change this to the correct date and time it lasts for around 5 minutes before reverting back to January 2000 again. How can I configure the correct time and get this to stick? The computer is running Windows XP.

Time related problems such as the one being experienced on your computer are generally related to the CMOS battery on the motherboard of your computer being flat. The computer motherboard stores certain information about your computer, such as the hard drive configuration, power management configuration, and the date and time. In order to retain this information the motherboard always requires a small amount of power. This is not a problem when your computer is plugged into a power outlet, since even when the computer is turned off it still draws a small amount of power for the motherboard which allows this information to be retained. However, if the power to the computer is terminated (for example, if you unplug the computer from a power outlet or there is a power outage) then the information would be lost, since there is no power being fed to the computer for the retention of this information. Therefore to get around this problem, every personal computer has a CMOS battery on the motherboard which provides the small amount of power required to retain these settings when the computer has no power source (these are generally button-cell batteries – you can see an example battery on Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS_Battery). The CMOS battery with a computer can last around two to ten years, but this depends on a number of factors. If you are finding that the time reverts on your computer then it’s likely that the master time on the motherboard (in an area known as the BIOS) is being lost due to the CMOS battery being flat. Since this is how Windows gets the time, that would explain why the Windows time keeps defaulting back to January 2000.

Your best option in this situation is to replace the CMOS battery. If you are inexperienced with fixing computers then I would recommend that you take the computer to a repair shop for this fix. It is a fairly straight-forward operation (for someone who knows what they are doing), so assuming they have the part in stock they should be able to fix this fairly quickly. Once the battery has been replaced you will just need to boot the computer and then go into the BIOS setup (this is accessible by tapping a hot-key on the keyboard during the boot-up procedure) and then setting the time correctly. The BIOS is a very sensitive part of Windows and changing the wrong settings could have all sorts of undesirable consequences. Additionally, given that there is such a variety of different computer BIOSes I cannot provide step-by-step instructions. Therefore, I would recommend that you ask the computer technician to at least perform this step for you, which should only take a few minutes.