Changing the CMOS battery I should have said.

Having had a look the laptop is not very old so probably not that.

Maybe check in the Bios that it is set to the proper time and date.

And try right clicking the time icon in the Taskbar and make sure the time zone is set to Dublin,Edinburgh,Lisbon and London.

To check the BIOS: when your laptop boots, you should see an option to press a key during the boot process to take you to 'set up'. Which key you have to press varies from PC to PC. You have to be quick, though. Very often, the first time you try, you'll only just have time to see which key it is you have to press - but no time to actually press it. So, wait till the laptop is fully booted, then reboot it again - but this time, keep tapping the relevant key throughout the boot process.

When you get there, there will be simple instructions on screen. You can easily navigate your way to the time/date kept by the BIOS.

Re Internet time: that's a strange one. In XP - I'm not very familiar with W7 - if I double click on the time in the task bar, I open up a dialogue box. One of the tabs in that box is 'Internet Time', and there's a box that you can check that tells your PC to automatically synchronise with Internet time. That might be worth a try - if you can find the functionality in W7. In true W7 fashion, it's probably there - they've just hidden it in a different place... :-(

Yes, it does. What I guess they're recommending is that you wipe out everything and start again. Given the nature of your problems as I understand them, that's overkill - a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Manufacturers like to tell you to do that, or to reformat your hard drive and reinstall Windows, because it's a quick, simple - for them - solution and makes you go away, so they don't have to think about it any more.

But, like you said: Job 1 is to get your personal stuff backed up. I can't think what else to back up other than your photos, music, documents, spreadsheets, cookies and favourites. You may want to check in your 'downloads' folder, see if there's anything there you want/need to keep.

One of the advantages of backing up to an external hard drive rather than a DVD is that you have much more space, so you can just copy the entire contents of your internal hard drive over to it without having to worry whether you've included everything: you know it'll be on the external drive if you should ever need it.

Oh, and: backups aren't just for Christmas... :-) Try to get into the habit of doing it regularly. My system automatically backs up every day (overnight) which might be overkill, but you should try to do it once a week as a minimum. I'd say that spending money on an external hard drive might be one of the best investments you'll ever make.