HP nc6000 bios/date question

OK, this is weird.

I've looked thru the BIOS 20 times now. I cannot find a place to set the date/time. I've never seen a BIOS that doesn't let you do that. What am I missing?

The BIOS version is labeled F.OF 07/23/2004

I googled 'nc6000 bios set date' but got zero hits.

I'm guessing that it's never been flashed? Flashing BIOS is of course risky business, but I have a genuine HP external floppy drive (USB connection) and HP has a diskette version of a BIOS revision. The last revision they offered for this lappy was in 2005, but it's newer than the one I have.

So I installed Xubuntu for testing purposes. Xubuntu comes up, sez it's 2008, then after it's been online for a few minutes the date gets corrected. Maybe Xubuntu is contacting the Ubuntu servers and getting the date from the network?

EDIT: Using the HP diskette download, I was able to update BIOS. However, new BIOS is just as bare-bones as old...still can't find a date/time setting.

 

You would probably need to replace RTC battery, then laptop would not forget correct time/date every time it is shut down and setting it once in linux/windows would keep it correct.

Service Manual has some bios-related options but I did not see time/date option at a glance.

 

Yup, installed new battery. The laptop isn't losing its brains every time I unplug it now.
And I was able to flash the BIOS to latest. The new BIOS is as feature-less as the old one.
Since it's a 'corporate' laptop, I wonder if there are more features in BIOS after setting an admin password?

Thanks for the link to the Manual. Not one word about BIOS. That's weird.