Computer won't keep time, programs freeze

I have a computer that was not keeping time and was alerting me during boot up to set date/time. I needed to hit F1 to continue booting. It was also freezing constantly. I attributed the time issue to the CMOS battery and decided to wipe the machine to hopefully rid it of the freezing issue. There wasn't much on it so I wasn't worried about losing anything and it seemed the fastest way. After doing both, I'm still having the same problems. Could it be a bad memory stick?

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

Did you change the battery yet?

 

Yep. Wiped the computer and changed the battery too.

 

Maybe HDD issues, I had that once when SMART didn't warn me of any problems. Is your HDD working harder than usual? Try the HDD maker's testing app just to eliminate that. Do you have anything connected to USB? The idea here is to strip everything down to the bare essentials, just RAM and video card. Any exclamation marks in device manager? You can run Memtest86+ to test your RAM. I'll leave it to someone else to continue as I'm out of ideas now.

 

I would suspect a motherboard malfunction, perhaps bad caps.

Try removing the 'board from the case and setting it up on an antistatic bag or cardboard to eliminate any possible short-circuit.