Unexplained
Maybe relevant but it looks like a lot of "old" laptops might have had evil BIOS chips.
The specific affected part numbers are 25L16 and 25L08 and symptoms include sudden failure to boot and other strange behavior but it can include clock shifting and corruption of hard drive/SSD.
One thing which is very strange seems to be that the laptop responds to certain inputs despite displaying all the symptoms of BIOS corruption. How hard would it be to "imitate" this failure for information gathering purposes then mysteriously fix itself when the right key combination is entered by a technician?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
