The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.

"root" wrote in message
...
The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.

Dunno what's causing it, but just put free utility "D4" on the machine, and
set it to correct the time every 5 minutes.

http://download.cnet.com/Dimension-4...-10039998.html

That way, it'll stay close enough all day. One of my workshop machines loses
a coupla minutes a day. D4 runs in the background all the time, and keeps it
right. Needs a connection to the 'net of course, but at least it will put
the time right automatically as soon as you go online, if you don't have a
permanent connection.

Arfa

This is a chronic problem that seems to afflict all computers. I've never
owned a machine whose clock didn't lose time.

Outside of resetting the clock manually, or running a utility that reads the
time from some "correct" source and resets the clock, I know of no solution.

In article ,
William Sommerwerck wrote:
This is a chronic problem that seems to afflict all computers. I've never
owned a machine whose clock didn't lose time.

Well yes, but surely only a few seconds a day?

This machine checks and updates the time via the net and tells me when it
does it. Usually approx twice a week and four seconds.

--
*If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown too?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

This is a chronic problem that seems to afflict all computers. I've never
owned a machine whose clock didn't lose time.

Well, yes, but surely only a few seconds a day?

Please don't call me surely.

I should have pointed out that 20 minutes a day is, indeed, unusual. But
computer clocks are notoriously inaccurate. And I've never seen one that
gained time.

In article ,
William Sommerwerck wrote:
This is a chronic problem that seems to afflict all computers. I've
never owned a machine whose clock didn't lose time.

Well, yes, but surely only a few seconds a day?

Please don't call me surely.

Ok. How about Kali? The goddess of time?

I should have pointed out that 20 minutes a day is, indeed, unusual. But
computer clocks are notoriously inaccurate. And I've never seen one that
gained time.

Think you're right there. So perhaps there's a reason for it. They're
never going to be *that* accurate given the crystals they use.

--
*The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

This is a chronic problem that seems to afflict all computers.
I've never owned a machine whose clock didn't lose time.

Well, yes, but surely only a few seconds a day?

Please don't call me surely.

Ok. How about Kali? The goddess of time?

Well, hello, Kali!

In article ,
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

In article ,
William Sommerwerck wrote:
This is a chronic problem that seems to afflict all computers. I've
never owned a machine whose clock didn't lose time.

Well, yes, but surely only a few seconds a day?

Please don't call me surely.

Ok. How about Kali? The goddess of time?

I should have pointed out that 20 minutes a day is, indeed, unusual. But
computer clocks are notoriously inaccurate. And I've never seen one that
gained time.

Think you're right there. So perhaps there's a reason for it. They're
never going to be *that* accurate given the crystals they use.

The bottom line is that unless you synchronize it with a "reference"
timekeeper, it *will not* run at the correct rate. The only question is
how fast it will drift. NTP clients (*good* ones) can deal with the
problem amazingly well, but only if the host's network connection is
pretty much continuous and the host essentially does not sleep.

Isaac

"root" schreef in bericht
...
The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.

Well... Guess t's too late for guarantee.

A new battery sometimes solves the problem.

Find the clock/calender chip on your mainboard. If it has a DIP package, it
can be replaced easily. (Hmm... That's to say I can. Don't know about your
skills.) Some SMD-packages can also be replaced but less easily.

Buy, build a battery backup clock that can communicate via the serial port
or an USB one. You will of course need some software too.

Ever saw a high accurate clock on a PCI-card. Don't remember where but still
remember I considered it way too expensive.

petrus bitbyter

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:45:42 +0000 (UTC), root
wrote:

The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

Well, that's:
20/1440 = 1.4% accuracy

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

Any particular maker, model, motherboard model?

I've seen the same problem on various machines over the years. On
servers, the problem became sufficiently critical to impliment a fix.
I measured the frequency of the common 14.31818 MHz crystal feeding
the clock oscillator and found it to vary horribly with temperature. I
replaced the crystal with a somewhat better packaged oscillator:
http://parts.digikey.ie/1/1/67619-oscillator-14-31818mhz-full-mxo45t-2c-14m31818.html
That reduced the drift to tolerable levels. Modern motherboards use
different frequencies, but the same principle applies.

For a 14.31818Mhz oscillator to be off 1.4%, it would read about
14.5Mhz. Measure yours.

More difficult to fix are applications that steal clock cycles or beat
up on the processor sufficiently that it misses interrupts. On my old
Pentium III desktop, playing DVD videos was the worst culprit. I also
found some CPU benchmark programs that intentionally made the
processor very busy (and very hot) that ate CPU cycles. I can't offer
any suggestions without knowing the hardware, the system, and the
software mix.

There was also a problem with some old Dell machines, where the BIOS
and the OS were fighting each other for control of the clock. There
was a fix, but I'm too lazy to look for it.

One machine I worked with had a unique problem. When the machine went
into standby, the clock would just stop. When it came out of standby,
it would continue where it left off, losing the time it was in
standby. It was fixed under warranty. I don't recall the vendor.

Oh yeah, check the button battery that backs up the clock. It might
be dead or dying.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

One machine I worked with had a unique problem. When the machine went
into standby, the clock would just stop. When it came out of standby,
it would continue where it left off, losing the time it was in
standby. It was fixed under warranty. I don't recall the vendor.

Oh yeah, check the button battery that backs up the clock. It might
be dead or dying.

I've had machines with faulty (or even missing) CMOS battery causing the
Clock to stop in Standby but still not any loss of setup data.

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:45:42 +0000 (UTC), root
wrote:

The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.
Since you are on this newsgroup, fixing it should be easy. All it
requires is a little soldering. I just checked two fairly modern
motherboards and located the crystal that is associated with the CMOS
clock. Look for a small cylinder lying flat to the board in the
neightborhood of the CMOS battery. That is the crystal that controls
the clock. The error you are seeing is well outside the normal
tolerances for a 'good' (or even a cheap) crystal. Replace it.

If you want high accuracy, it would be necessary to adjust the
frequency by adjusting the parallel capacitor, but normally you should
have an error of less than a minute a week with an uncalibrated
crystal.

PlainBill

wrote in message
...
On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:45:42 +0000 (UTC), root
wrote:

The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.
Since you are on this newsgroup, fixing it should be easy. All it
requires is a little soldering. I just checked two fairly modern
motherboards and located the crystal that is associated with the CMOS
clock. Look for a small cylinder lying flat to the board in the
neightborhood of the CMOS battery. That is the crystal that controls
the clock. The error you are seeing is well outside the normal
tolerances for a 'good' (or even a cheap) crystal. Replace it.

If you want high accuracy, it would be necessary to adjust the
frequency by adjusting the parallel capacitor, but normally you should
have an error of less than a minute a week with an uncalibrated
crystal.

PlainBill



I think they are similar to watch crystals and are susceptible to vibration,
make sure its glued down.

In article ,
"George Jetson" wrote:

wrote in message
...
On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:45:42 +0000 (UTC), root
wrote:

The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.
Since you are on this newsgroup, fixing it should be easy. All it
requires is a little soldering. I just checked two fairly modern
motherboards and located the crystal that is associated with the CMOS
clock. Look for a small cylinder lying flat to the board in the
neightborhood of the CMOS battery. That is the crystal that controls
the clock. The error you are seeing is well outside the normal
tolerances for a 'good' (or even a cheap) crystal. Replace it.

If you want high accuracy, it would be necessary to adjust the
frequency by adjusting the parallel capacitor, but normally you should
have an error of less than a minute a week with an uncalibrated
crystal.

PlainBill



I think they are similar to watch crystals and are susceptible to vibration,
make sure its glued down.

That will make it vibrate just as much as the mobo; if it's just hanging
there by its leads, it may well vibrate less.

Isaac

root wrote:
The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.

This thread reminds me of an old Columbo movie.
As I recall, the murderer had reset his PC clock so that certain data
would be erroneously timestamped while his PC was used during his
absence -- thus providing his alibi later. I don't recall how Columbo
realized this bit of trickery had taken place, but, being Columbo, he
did. Nowadays, the culprit would need to remember to also keep the
machine from syncing with online time servers!

Not particularly helpful to the OP, just throwing it out there as an
amusing tangent.

More on point, I have an old W2K machine -- Abit KT-7 RAID mobo that I
had to recap -- that loses about 10mins every couple weeks. It isn't a
"mission-critical" machine and isn't online often, but I don't mind
occasionally resetting its clock.

Ray L. Volts wrote:

More on point, I have an old W2K machine -- Abit KT-7 RAID mobo that I
had to recap -- that loses about 10mins every couple weeks. It isn't a
"mission-critical" machine and isn't online often, but I don't mind
occasionally resetting its clock.

Once a week I run a cron program that streamrips a radio program. I want
to get the start of the program [prairie home companion]. At 20 minutes
a day time loss, I have to sync the time just before I want to start
recording. So far I have set two additional cron jobs, one at the start
of the particular day, then one 15 minutes before the program begins.
It is like using a sledge hammer for everything I do.

Ray L. Volts wrote:

root wrote:
The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.

This thread reminds me of an old Columbo movie.
As I recall, the murderer had reset his PC clock so that certain data
would be erroneously timestamped while his PC was used during his
absence -- thus providing his alibi later. I don't recall how Columbo
realized this bit of trickery had taken place, but, being Columbo, he
did. Nowadays, the culprit would need to remember to also keep the
machine from syncing with online time servers!

Don't remember that one - do remember a Columbo movie where a VCR is used to
timeshift a programme (football game?) which together with drugging is used
to give the murderer a witness to prove that he was at home at the time of
the murder. Quite a new idea at the time - the movie was made before launch
of Betamax and VHS so was probably either a Umatic or Philips stacked reels
machine.

Beatnik internet clock
www.somedec.com/downloads/
JR



On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:45:42 +0000 (UTC), root
wrote:

The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.
HOME PAGE:
http://www.seanet.com/~jasonrnorth
--------------------------------------------------

"Meat Plow" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:45:42 +0000 (UTC), root
wrote:

The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.

Windows XP and Vista and Linux all have a built in clock sync with a
time server.
Figure out how to set it to update every 6 hours or less.

As far as the hardware is concerned it probably isn't fixable but it's
not the end of the world.

I don't get it. It is just stupid to require an "always up" Internet
connection for any kind of stability. Not to change the subject, B WTF with
my Win 98 machine that keeps trying to connect to NTP servers? I can't find
what process is doing that.

Meat Plow wrote:

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:55:14 GMT, "JB"
wrote:


"Meat Plow" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:45:42 +0000 (UTC), root
wrote:

The damned thing loses about 20 minutes/day and has
so since the machine was new about 3 years ago.

My guess is that it isn't fixable, but maybe you
have some ideas.

TIA.

Windows XP and Vista and Linux all have a built in clock
sync with a time server.
Figure out how to set it to update every 6 hours or
less.

As far as the hardware is concerned it probably isn't
fixable but it's not the end of the world.

I don't get it. It is just stupid to require an "always
up" Internet connection for any kind of stability.

I suppose the unstupid thing would be to replace the
hardware?

(snip)

Begin by finding out which of the two clocks is the bad guy.

The CMOS clock runs continuously, powered from the PC power
supply when available and from the CMOS battery otherwise.
During start-up the O/S reads this hardware clock and uses
this value to initialize the software clock that is the date
and time source until the next startup.

A bum oscillator or low CMOS battery will cause hardware
clock errors and result in wrong-time initialization.

If the CPU misses servicing the clock interrupt or other bad
stuff, the operating system's idea of time will suffer, but
the hardware clock keeps right on ticking.

So, if you're losing time without a reboot, the CMOS is
innocent and the O/S and CPU aren't doing the right dance.
If the time is wrong from the gitgo, then the HW clock is
the culprit.

Bryce

Bryce wrote:

If the CPU misses servicing the clock interrupt or other bad
stuff, the operating system's idea of time will suffer, but
the hardware clock keeps right on ticking.

So, if you're losing time without a reboot, the CMOS is
innocent and the O/S and CPU aren't doing the right dance.
If the time is wrong from the gitgo, then the HW clock is
the culprit.

Bryce

Good points. The computer loses time when it is running.
It is the way the time is updated by the cpu/kernel.
I am running linux.

In article , root wrote:

Good points. The computer loses time when it is running.
It is the way the time is updated by the cpu/kernel.
I am running linux.

This suggests that one of several things is happening.

One is that some device driver in your system is disabling interrupt
processing for a period longer than the kernel's "tick" time value
(usually 1 millisecond, in modern Linux kernels). I've seen this
happen with some disk and network drivers, particularly under periods
of high loading. Some video-card drivers might also have this
problem, particularly when doing highly-intensive rendering.

Another possibility is that your system is configured to use a "high
resolution timer" system to keep track of the time... i.e. a timer
within the CPU itself which ticks along at the basic CPU clock rate,
or some sub-multiple of it. If the motherboard / BIOS / kernel
"thinks" that the CPU is running at a certain clock rate, but the
actual oscillator is a bit slow, then the high-resolution timer will
be running at a rate slower than the kernel's computations expect, and
the clock will drift.

You may be able to resolve the problem by using the NTP daemon
(available in most distributions). It has two benefits:

- It can set, and resynchonize the system clock via periodic queries of
highly-stable time servers, via the Internet. This gives you a
very reliable time-sync to start with.

- It can calculate the amount of "drift" that your system's local
clock has (by comparing the system clock-run rate against the rate
deduced by querying NTP servers), and can then instruct the kernel
to compensate for this drift (i.e. "tweaking" the kernel's own
clock-update algorithm). This compensation helps keep the clock
correct, in between the larger adjustements that the NTP daemon
makes when it queries Internet time servers.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Dave Platt wrote:
You may be able to resolve the problem by using the NTP daemon
(available in most distributions). It has two benefits:

- It can set, and resynchonize the system clock via periodic queries of
highly-stable time servers, via the Internet. This gives you a
very reliable time-sync to start with.

- It can calculate the amount of "drift" that your system's local
clock has (by comparing the system clock-run rate against the rate
deduced by querying NTP servers), and can then instruct the kernel
to compensate for this drift (i.e. "tweaking" the kernel's own
clock-update algorithm). This compensation helps keep the clock
correct, in between the larger adjustements that the NTP daemon
makes when it queries Internet time servers.


Thanks for the advice Dave, I started ntpd and will see how that
works.

root wrote:

Bryce wrote:

If the CPU misses servicing the clock interrupt or other
bad stuff, the operating system's idea of time will
suffer, but the hardware clock keeps right on ticking.

So, if you're losing time without a reboot, the CMOS is
innocent and the O/S and CPU aren't doing the right
dance. If the time is wrong from the gitgo, then the HW
clock is the culprit.

Bryce

Good points. The computer loses time when it is running.
It is the way the time is updated by the cpu/kernel.
I am running linux.

Me too. Have a look at man hwclock.

Maybe running hwclock -r to resync the system time to the
CMOS (RTC) clock every so often as a cron job would suffice.
hwclock does tweaking to counter long-term drift in the RTC.
Not as spiffy as syncing with a time server, but no internet
connection needed.

Bryce