On 8/14/2009 6:52 AM Meat Plow spake thus:

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:53:23 -0700, David Nebenzahl
wrote:

Sounds OK to me, except that I just checked and reset my computah's
clock (I use a little Windoze utility called "NIStime" that gets the
time from NIST); it was off by about 5 minutes. Haven't synched it up
for at least 6 months, so I know my RTCC is at least that accurate.
(Running W2K, so I assume that no software process is adjusting my
clock.) Shouldn't most PC clocks be about that accurate? (Older MB,
forget exactly what, can find out if you're interested.)

W2K has an SNTP client built in. Run cmd.exe then type 'net time /?'
for help.

I used to build OEM computers and have seen many different degrees of
inaccuracy both positive and negative.

Thanks; as Johnny Carson used to say, "I did not know that".

So how does NTP work in this case? I'm guessing it must contact some
entity over "the network" (meaning something external to my computer) in
order to determine the actual time, no? How does this work? Who does it
contact? (Short answer will be fine.) I do notice that one of the NTP
commands is

[\\computername] /SETSNTP[:ntp server list]

so I assume my computah keeps a list of servers "out there".

(So I guess if my computer is contacting a time server out there
periodically, but my clock was still off by 5 minutes, then the RTCC
must be *really* inaccurate.)

By the way, you can type "net time ?" to see the "help" info.


--
Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism