The CMOST battery in an old laptop of mine is dead. I need to be able
to open & edit Word documents away from computers once a week for the
rest of the month. It's not worth it to shell out several hundred
dollars for a new laptop when this is the first time I've needed this
one in years. Is there any reason why I can't stick a batch file in
my startup items folder in Win98 First Edition with two lines
date
time
to prompt me to set the date and time like some of my friends used to
have to do with their MS-DOS systems when I was a child? The default
settings for the laptop seem to work just fine, the only problem I
see with the dead CMOS battery is the messed up clock. Is there
anything else I might not be noticing? When I've checked Setup (hit f2
to enter setup) everything except the clock looks fine.

Oh, should I use startup items or edit the traditional autoexec.bat? I
can't recall if that gets used by default, or only when booting to MS-
DOS mode.