On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 23:25:49 GMT, Don Bruder put
finger to keyboard and composed:

In article . com,
wrote:

Why do the battery powered clocks in personal computers tend to keep
worse time than quartz watches, even the $1 ones?

The computer batteries measure fine, at least 3.15V.

I thought that the problem was temperature swings in the computers
(25-38C), but a couple of cheapo watches taped inside the computers
kept better time.


Dunno if it's still true in PC-land - I've been living in a Mac world
for a LONG time now - but when I was playing with them years ago, the
battery-backed real-time clock was read once at startup to set the
computer's software clock, which then kept time by counting clock
interrupts generated by the motherboard timing circuitry.

It's true for Win98, but I don't know about XP.

Just for fun, here's something interesting that I discovered recently:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....e=source&hl=en

I could make time run backwards on a Win98SE machine by doing
something innocuous.

-- Franc Zabkar

Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.