Martin Brown wrote:
On 22/08/2012 17:00, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
PeterC wrote:
On Wed, 22 Aug 2012 09:01:26 +0100, Mark wrote:

Then take into account the effects of some software. The version of
Opera
that I'm running atm causes the clock to gain by about 5s between the
2-minute-interval ping of npl.
Please explain how it does this.

I can't. It's been mentioned on Opera forums but nothing conclusive was
posted.
It seems that peter is correct.

Opera is delving into the OS to make a lot of system calls that affect
how timer interrupts happen. The more tabs or windows open in opera, and
the more you move them around, the more it buggers up windows own clock.

Basically its a windows bug. Timer events should pre-empt all other
interrupts at the highest priority. And no system calls should be able
to affect this.

But the claim here is that the PC clock runs *fast* by 4% when Opera is
running. Most normal system level blocking of interrupts results in the
system clock losing a few ticks not creating virtual bogus ones!

It doesn't affect the RTC of course, and an NTP client run often enough
to keep the clock in synch would probably help.

The RTC meanders on its own sweet untrimmed way.

But windows is a pile of **** anyway.


Just one more reason to use Linux, and put anything windowsish in a
sandbox that you don't care about.

Now, if only Corel Draw and RhinoCad ran on Native Linux...

Therein lies the problem. A lot of useful software for Windows only.

well the good news is that it takes about 10 secs to save/restore a
virtual machine so when I am not using them I dump the VM and free up
the RAM.


Regards,
Martin Brown



--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.