My system clock (on Win XP) creeps forward every day, ending up 5-10 mins fast. Whats going on?
October 15, 2004 7:09 AM   Subscribe

My system clock (on Win XP) creeps forward every day, ending up 5-10 mins fast. Whats going on? It's normally switched on 24/7, does this have something to do with it?
posted by Orange Goblin to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
How old is your computer? You may need to replace that little silver battery on the motherboard.
posted by aramaic at 7:33 AM on October 15, 2004


PC clock hardware is notoriously inaccurate. Fortunately, XP provides clock synchronization in the Date & Time control panel. Double click on the taskbar clock and turn it on.
posted by majick at 7:34 AM on October 15, 2004


Response by poster: My PC is new this year, so I don't think it is the battery...and wouldn't that only come in to play when the PC was switched off anyway? I have the clock synchronization turned on, but it only does it every week...
posted by Orange Goblin at 8:13 AM on October 15, 2004


My computer does this as well, but not as bad. I ended up downloading a free application from NIST that'll sync my computer with their atomic clocks.

I've configured it to sync every hour, run in the background, and start automatically on start up. So when I hit www.time.gov I'm within .01 seconds of the official US time... comes in handy when people accuse me of running late. :-)
posted by jwells at 8:34 AM on October 15, 2004


I had this once, and I thought that the RTC on my motherboard had gone bad (my clock was 15 minutes fast per HOUR!). Usually a low battery would stop the clock or make it slow. Faster... that's odd.

Personally, I set up the net command to set the time from one of our servers every 15 minutes.

Eventually, I re-installed XP, and lo-and-behold, everything was back to normal. No more fast clock.

I put it down to something broken in XP.
posted by shepd at 10:40 AM on October 15, 2004


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