PC clock suddenly incredibly slow

[Nate Nagel]

Hi all,

have a Gateway laptop, P4 processor... this is actually the second
laptop of the exact same model that I've had (busted my old one, bought
another on eBay, transferred my HDD over - that was a good plan, as the
screen went on the "new" one in about 6 mos, easy fix with spare parts
laying around!) Anyway, I had the same problem on my old one... ended
up installing some software, but I don't remember from where, to have it
sync up more reliably. Didn't have the same problem with the new one -
once a week was "close enough." Today I forced it to sync this AM and
it was already 15 minutes slow when I came back to it.

1) what gives?

2) anyone remember what the software was that I'm thinking of?

thanks

nate

 

[Paul]

Hi all,

have a Gateway laptop, P4 processor... this is actually the second
laptop of the exact same model that I've had (busted my old one, bought
another on eBay, transferred my HDD over - that was a good plan, as the
screen went on the "new" one in about 6 mos, easy fix with spare parts
laying around!) Anyway, I had the same problem on my old one... ended
up installing some software, but I don't remember from where, to have it
sync up more reliably. Didn't have the same problem with the new one -
once a week was "close enough." Today I forced it to sync this AM and
it was already 15 minutes slow when I came back to it.

1) what gives?

2) anyone remember what the software was that I'm thinking of?

thanks

nate

When Windows is running, time keeping is done by the processor.
Clock tick interrupts are counted, as a means to compute the
current time. When Windows boots, the RTC is copied to memory.
After that, (high priority) clock tick interrupts are counted,
and used to increment the value kept in memory.

If some software manages to prevent the clock tick interrupt
from getting serviced, then time increments can be lost, and
the apparent clock time will be slower than nominal.

Sometimes, this is caused by a hardware problem. For example,
the Nforce2 chipset, had some kind of interrupt logic problem,
that caused the time to be inaccurate. It manifests itself,
when the input clock is not a canonical value (FSB200, FSB266,
FSB333, FSB400 and so on).

If the time loss, is while the computer is not running
Windows, such as sleep or hibernate, then the RTC is
being relied upon to keep time. And at that point, if the
battery was flat, and the mains were disconnected, the
battery could be to blame for time inaccuracy.

Paul

 

[RF]

Hi all,

have a Gateway laptop, P4 processor... this is actually the second
laptop of the exact same model that I've had (busted my old one, bought
another on eBay, transferred my HDD over - that was a good plan, as the
screen went on the "new" one in about 6 mos, easy fix with spare parts
laying around!) Anyway, I had the same problem on my old one... ended
up installing some software, but I don't remember from where, to have it
sync up more reliably. Didn't have the same problem with the new one -
once a week was "close enough." Today I forced it to sync this AM and
it was already 15 minutes slow when I came back to it.

1) what gives?

2) anyone remember what the software was that I'm thinking of?

thanks

nate

Could be the battery of your BIOS -it is a common cause of this.

 

[Mike Walsh]

Hi all,

have a Gateway laptop, P4 processor... this is actually the second
laptop of the exact same model that I've had (busted my old one, bought
another on eBay, transferred my HDD over - that was a good plan, as the
screen went on the "new" one in about 6 mos, easy fix with spare parts
laying around!) Anyway, I had the same problem on my old one... ended
up installing some software, but I don't remember from where, to have it
sync up more reliably. Didn't have the same problem with the new one -
once a week was "close enough." Today I forced it to sync this AM and
it was already 15 minutes slow when I came back to it.

1) what gives?

See Paul's explanation

2) anyone remember what the software was that I'm thinking of?

There are many time synchronizers available from http://www.tucows.com/search.html?s...ynchronizers&srch_pf=win&search_lib=&x=25&y=9
I have been using an old version of Tardis for years. You can specify how often the time is synchronized.

 

[Sam P]

I've used symmtime at
http://www.symmetricom.com/
it's free.