System Clock

[Spike9458]

Quick question on the system clock. A friend of mine has a computer that is
just over a year old, runs WindowsXP Home Edition, but the clock loses time
pretty fast. One morning I was helping out, and in the run of about 3 hours
it lost an hour, I reset the clock several times. I suppose it could be the
cmos battery, but it seems like it should have lasted longer than a year. I
couldn't find anything in the MS knowledge base when searching for 'system
clock loses time' that was of any help.

Thanks,

--Jim

 

[Alex Nichol]

Quick question on the system clock. A friend of mine has a computer that is
just over a year old, runs WindowsXP Home Edition, but the clock loses time
pretty fast. One morning I was helping out, and in the run of about 3 hours
it lost an hour, I reset the clock several times. I suppose it could be the
cmos battery

If it happens while windows is running you can definitely say it is NOT
the battery, which is not involved in the windows clock once that has
been set at boot.

This problem seems to happen quite often, especially with Dell
machines. Usually a steady rate of loss like 10 minutes in an hour. It
appears to result from a conflict with the BIOS over the interval
between 'timer interrupts'. Windows maintains the clock by counting
these, so if the interval is not the expected one, the rate is grossly
out in this manner.

Try these steps:

1. Start->Run cmd.exe
2. net stop w32time
3. w32tm.exe /unregister
4. w32tm.exe /register
5. net start w32time

(note spellings w32tm and w32time in different commands)