Using the manual robrenz posted, skip to page 31 of the pdf (page 56/57 of the manual, section VII: Maintenance), and follow the proceedure to replace the 9V battery. While there, check the fuses.
Yes, this means you'll need a second meter. You didn't provide your location, but even the extremely cheap and disliked meter from Harbor Freight here in the USofA will do. Maybe your friend can let you borrow his/her new meter for a day or two.
If the fuses pass, then you'll need to pick up some components to measure to see how far off your meter is. You'll also need a second meter for this, to give you a baseline value for each component. Since this meter has full-scale values of 4xxxx, I'd suggest staying in the middle by using "22" or "27" values:
22/27 ohm resistor
220/270 ohm resistor
2.2k/2.7k ohm resistor
22k/27k ohm resistor (use this or 220K if you can only get one value)
220k/270k ohm resistor
2.2M/2.7M ohm resistor
22M/27M ohm resistor
9 or 12VDC battery or wall adaptor (check actual voltage with second meter)
Jumper leads (wires with "alligator" clips on each end)
DO NOT try to measure ANY mains voltages until we have this thing figured out! Pictures of the inside would be really nice to have, too.
The resistors will verify each of the ranges of your meter (in ohms setting) are reading correctly. Same with the battery/adaptor voltage. To measure current, just use the 220k/270k in series with the battery and measure with the second meter. Your meter should read about the same. If any of these readings are off, post what you were trying to read, what the good meter read, and what your meter reads:
Item GoodDMM MyDMM
220K 219.99K 109.49K
12VDC 12.834VDC 6.4170VDC
12VDC/220K (~58uA) 59.016uA 29.231uA
In Dave's videos, he uses a precision reference to do this, but we're just seeing what's going on with the meter, so we don't need this kind of precision (just yet). Even the previously mentioned Harbor Freight meter can get you down to less than 3% accuracy. For most young players, this is pretty darned good.
If you want to go the extra mile and measure capacitance, frequency, or conductance and post results here, that's okay - but my guess is that whatever the problem is, it's affecting every range, so solving for the main three should help us zero in on the problem. In the case I present above, we can see that my phantom meter is reading almost exactly half of what it should. This leads us to suspect the meter's reference voltage. If the current was okay, then we'd know the reference was okay, but since the volt/ohm share inputs, we'd start looking there for problems.
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