Itβs possible they had a dead BIOS battery, and whenever they had to boot up, they had to reset the BIOS clock, or the system would go haywire thinking it was Jan 1, 1992 or whatever the default date was.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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That is the answer.
Some boards will prompt you to press the key to enter the BIOS as the only option when the CMOS battery is flat. Whether or not you set the clock, you still have to enter the bios to boot.
The battery is a standard CR2032, so it's easy to replace, but it's not something that most people experience, so it's not common knowledge.
Personally I went about 6 months doing the same thing before I even bothered googling "how much does a CMOS battery cost" because it was an old pc anyway.
I had taken out the CMOS on my PC battery when I was a kid so that it would reset the time every startup and I could use the 30 day test version of windows and other programs indefinitely.
I vaguelly remember around this time some low end computers were shipped with FreeDOS instead of Windows, in order to save on licencing fees. AFAIK this was the case because legislation in some european countries restricted the sale of new computers to ones which had an OS preinstalled.
Maybe XP was installed after the purchases however a partition with FreeDOS/whatever remained as the default boot option. Hence your parents had to select the other boot option (Windows XP) manually. Granted you could change your primary boot partition permanently, but maybe your parents didn't know this.