callcard1 said:
My computer clock runs slow! A few minutes a week.
STEPS to fix ALREADY TAKEN:
I have changed the MB battery (2 times in the last year). Still running slow.
About 2 years ago I put in a new power supply and a new hard drive.
The MB is an ASUS P4B533 (about 9 years old) with a P4 1.7 GHz chip.
Running Win xp sp2
Any suggestions on what would STILL cause the clock to run slow and WHAT
STEPS I MIGHT TAKE to fix it?
Is there any program that I can put into my start up folder to run, check
and automatically adjust the clock each time i boot up? (I do not think that
the Windows time synchro can be set to run at boot up. It seems that it can
only be set to run once a week)
thx
The RTC (real-time clock) chip will maintain time within a couple
minutes per month. It is used when you boot your system. It is NOT
used when the OS is running. So if the OS is highly stressed, its clock
routine will get interrupted too often with the result that it loses
time. That's why you need to run a time sync utility, especially if you
leave your host powered up 24x7.
While Windows comes with a Windows Time service to synchronize the
clock, it does this at undefined intervals of its choosing. Also, it is
preconfigured to use the Microsoft NTP servers which can get too busy to
handle your request for an update (because all the other Windows users
are using the default NTP server, too). You can edit the registry to
add more NTP servers to the list available when using the Date and Time
applet in Control Panel under the Internet tab. The NIST server might
also be listed but, too, gets heavily accessed. These entries are
stored under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DateTime\Servers
It's easier to use a 3rd party time sync utility than to edit the
registry (providing you know the NTP servers you are allowed to access
and want to add to this list which have the lowest latency -- which is
NOT the same as which ones are physically close to you). Many 3rd party
time sync utilities will poll a long list of available 2nd tier NTP
servers to find out which ones have the lowest latency (on the network)
and one to sync your OS clock.
I use LocutusCodeware's Socketwatch but it's not free
(
http://www.locutuscodeware.com/swatch.htm). There are free ones but
most are extremely simplistic in their features. You can also update
the NTP server list used by SocketWatch. For example, if my local
university's NTP servers had not been listed, I could have added them to
the servers.dat text file. Although close, I did not reduce the servers
list to just my university's NTP servers as they may not have the
shortest latency. A server thousands of miles away might have a lower
latency (time between hops from source to target host) than the network
route to a physically closer server.
I configure the time sync at 1-hour intervals. I could go for 1-week
intervals but 1 hour is not considered abusive at all. Do not go less
than 10 minutes as this is often seen as abusive access and your OS
clock shouldn't need to be updated that often. A reason to keep your
clock in sync is that SSL requires the server and client hosts to be
relatively close in time (with a minute, or so). Part of the hash code
used in the initial handshaking includes a timestamp. If one host's
time is significantly different than for the host at the other end of
the connection, the session establishment process times out (it didn't
actually time on in how long it took but because it looks like it took
too long due to a host's clock being way off from the timestamp in the
hash code). So you want to keep your OS clock within a minute of the
standard time.
