This Acer was last turned ON in 2004. IT has Vista installed. The first indication was a long beep on startup. Checking the 3 volt CMOS battery showed only 1 volt. New battery and a little wait time and this old machine booted right up. After doing some work and updating some apps I advanced the clock to the present time. Shut the machine down and waited until the next day to continue my work. When I again powered it up, it would not boot. The CD drive flashed a couple of times but the HDD would not spin up. I again removed the CMOS battery, let it set over night, reinstalled the battery and it booted as normal.
It will not do any MS updates.
Do you think this is so far out of date that any changes to the system clock will prevent booting?
Do you think this is so far out of date that any changes to the system clock will prevent booting?
Possible, but not probable, especially since you say the hard drive doesn't spin. But you could try not changing the date and see if it behaves differently.
I'm curious about what you intend to do with this computer? Unless it has really good specs (quad-core processor, more than 4GB RAM, good graphics) it's probably not worth messing with. If you just need the data, pull the hard drive and slave it on another machine long enough to copy files.
Behind every good computer... is a jumble of wires 'n stuff.