crugers thanks for your reply, got over the shock now but camera kept powering itself off yesterday (strange)and so every groups of photos have different date/time. I love having the time.
anyway I just cropped the pictures to get rid of time/date altogether, wonder will this distort quality of picture when I order prints off the net.......
There is probably a setting on the camera to control whether the date/time appears in the photo or not. You are generally better switching this off, i.e. no date/time to appear in the photos. The date/time taken is encoded into the photo, and can be checked via the file properties in Windows anyway.