Windows clock

Ok. Here's something new. My clock in Windows XP is fast. I'm not talking a few minutes over a matter of days, I'm talking in an hours time from setting it from a time server it's almost 15 minutes fast.

What is causing this? My guess is low CMOS battery.

I dropped my overclock, check for virii, trojans, and did a full scan with Adaware. These turned up nothing. I've rebooted and the clock in the BIOS is doing the same thing (of course it is, that's where windows get IT'S time silly...).

I've heard of clocks getting slower when the battery gets low, but no faster. But then again, this VP-6 is getting long in the tooth.

Do you have windows set to sync with internet clocks? If so, its possible thier clocks are faster than yours.

On a similar topic, my windows clock randomly jumps about an hour ahead or 2 hours behind (no other variations) every so often. Windows is possesed. It's XP Pro corporate edition btw.

I've had this happen with older boards too, but I was unable to discover what was causing the problem. In most cases it's symptoms were minor and other resulting phenoma actually doubled the performance of windows operations. I have yet to find a solution or discover what the cause was (or I just can't remember how I caused it).

Easy way to find out if its a hardware or software problem. Boot to dos (boot disc if needed) and type TIME, then come back an hour later and type TIME again. If the clock is correct then its windows trying to time warp you into the future.

No, it's not set to sync with internet clocks, I have to sync it to keep the time CORRECT.

It's not any of my hardware causing this. I have set the time, let the computer set at the bios for an hour, returned, and the clock would again be way too fast, at least 15 minutes.

This is something that has just started happening as of yesterday. I'm going to stop and pick up a BIOS battery and see if that cures the problem.

Will it boot without a BIOS battery in at all?

If so, see if it keeps good time

Yeah and never ever shut the machine off too huh?

The problem is the cheap crappy watch crystals they use on the motherboard, they are not particularly accurate in the first place, and probably specced for operation at 20C, then they get all these heating and cooling cycles that send them way off kilter, that's even if it might not be because the part of the board they are on isn't holding them at something like 50C which is way out of spec.

This problem is as old as the PC itself. Onboard clocks have ever been very poor quality.

Only thing I can suggest is set it to get time from the server every 10 mins. If the net/site is too slow for that, then set up a local machine with a more reliable clock as a time server for the network, update that one off the net occasionally and let it update the local machines frequently.

regards,

Road Warrior

Well in my csae it cannot sync for some reason. I can't connect to either of the two server options...

I've heard about that, and had the problem on an older socket 7 board. The problem is that you have three source of power in a PC. The power supply (for the components), the cmos battery (to hold bios settings in case of power outage) and the battery of the clock generator (I don't think this is the real name of the thing) which is around 14MHz (14.something). Timings are done from this chip, and there is a power inside of this, it is supposed to be recharged from the main power supply (just like a capacitor does), but after a couple of years (10+)it may get faulty, make false clock references and requires replacement. It is possible to replace it. But the chip is not socketed

I think roadwarrior descriptions of that chip is more accurate than mine.

RoadWarrior said:

The problem is the cheap crappy watch crystals they use on the motherboard, they are not particularly accurate in the first place, and probably specced for operation at 20C, then they get all these heating and cooling cycles that send them way off kilter, that's even if it might not be because the part of the board they are on isn't holding them at something like 50C which is way out of spec.

This problem is as old as the PC itself. Onboard clocks have ever been very poor quality.

Only thing I can suggest is set it to get time from the server every 10 mins. If the net/site is too slow for that, then set up a local machine with a more reliable clock as a time server for the network, update that one off the net occasionally and let it update the local machines frequently.

regards,

Road Warrior

Click to expand...

Huh, last week mine kept gaining 6 minutes.

Wether I'd reset it by hand (in windoze) and come back in an hour, or after resetting it and coming back that evening, it was always 6 minutes fast.

I reset it in bios this past weekend, and it's been behaving.

Yes, roadwarrior's description is more accurate, however his solution is pointless.

Using net time is only masking the problem, not fixing it.

This board isn't that old. The internal temp of this computer has NEVER, EVER reached more than 75 degrees F. as it has an air conditioner hooked to the case. Not to mention I can probably count the number of times this computer has been rebooted in the past year without opening my fly.

This thing has been a pillar of stability and reliability.

Like I said, this isn't something that has been gradually getting worse. This thing has gone from perfect time for an entire year and a half to jumping ahead up to 20 minutes every hour.

if the clock is going faster, you are probably getting "slower" benchmark scores

100 frames per 1.2 seconds is slower than 100 frames per 1.0 seconds

That's going to totally screw up Internet poker...

The big thing is that I have a domain at home. For those of you that have computers on a domain you know that if your time is more then 5 minutes off the domain controller you can't be authenticated.

This is just something random, but you might check into it...

The BIOS has very low level control of pretty much everything. If you have recently flashed it, perhaps the BIOS could be screwing things up in some manner. Even if you haven't flashed it, you never know if it has any bugs that might actually lead to what you are experiencing.

Either way, figure out your motherboard revision and BIOS version number and head over to your motherboard manufacturer's website and read up in their FAQ and BIOS update text files to see if there is any mention of the problem you are having. Perhaps other people, with your same motherboard, are having a similar issue and thus the company may have a workaround for you.

If you can't find anything, you could also ask them directly, and they may be able to tell you directly if your clock chip is done for, or if something else could be causing the issue.

I don't know how much a clock chip would cost, but perhaps you can take your motherboard into a computer repair place and have them replace the part in question. If a lot of people have been having this issue, that repair place should be pretty good at ordering a good clock chip and putting it in for you. I don't know how much it would cost, but there is no harm in looking into it.

Well if you can rip a spare off an old board and do the repair yourself, replacing the clock chip and the timing crystal (if it has an external one) might be worthwhile to you, but a shop is likely to bill enough labour to cover the replacement of the board 3x over.

RoadWarrior said:

Well if you can rip a spare off an old board and do the repair yourself, replacing the clock chip and the timing crystal (if it has an external one) might be worthwhile to you, but a shop is likely to bill enough labour to cover the replacement of the board 3x over.

Click to expand...

If your up for it, and you know what you are doing, it may be a neat project you can post pictures of!

(then again, I may be addicted to the idea of seeing pictures in threads... I dunno...)

Uh... I'd replace the battery first before attacking the board with pliers and a soldering gun. Low or unstable voltages often make clocks run faster. Yes, I know it's unintuitive. But the frequency of a lot of simple clock circuits has an inverse relationship to the input voltage. Note that a "physical" clock will not display this behavior -- there, changing the voltage is changing the speed of an electrical motor, not changing the charging rate of a CMOS chip.