clock running too fast

[Slater]

my computer's clock is running to fast. I set it to the right time about 10 hours ago, but now it's fast by about 20-25 minutes. Earlier it was off by 45 minutes (before I set it to correct time).

Any hints?

[TheMelodyMaker]

This is just a long shot, but if your computer is really old, maybe the quartz crystal on the motherboard has developed a problem. My 12-year-old computer has the opposite problem -- it runs too slow.

I'm sorry to say that I don't know how to fix it, except to just remember to set the clock to the right time every so often.

[glitch1501]

maybe you need to change the battery on the mobo, or maybe you have a virus/worm that annoys you and changes it

[Felix]

I get the same sort of problem a lot, only mine keeps skipping exactly 4 hours ahead. I think it's just a bug, like the clock does something when I put the lappy in sleep or something....but I don't know..

[Warrior4Christ]

Get it to update from a time server very often?

[shooraijin]

I second the suggestion to check the CMOS battery. Quartz crystals are pretty hardy; it's more likely to not work at all than run "too fast." Otherwise, consider a mo'bo' swap.

[Slater]

yeah, clocks don't run fast when the battery is low. The computer's not more than a year and a half old, and changing the motherboard? Yeah right, I can barely pay for parking at school every day.

So, I like the idea of wiring my computer to an atomic clock. How do I do that?

Edit: Oh kewl, XP has that option built in. But it seems that time.windows.com is down... or at least not letting me connect.

[shooraijin]

It's not that the battery being low makes the clock run fast -- it means the time ends up wrong and *looks* like it's running too fast. 30 seconds with a multimeter and a little bit of effort will tell for sure.

If this computer is a year and a half old, is it still under warranty? Just because it's new(er) doesn't mean it might not be defective.

[Slater]

I don't want to send my computer in to be worked on, because the last time we did that, we got an inexperianced computer maintenence person who ended up frying everything about our computer... lost lots of data. Eventually they replaced the system, but... it took them 3 months and we had to fight with them through the whole process... not something I wanna risk repeating.

[Mithrandir]

Whoa. Don't go that route, no. lol. Have you checked out if you were synced to a time server before hand? I had that happen once. I thought the computer kept jumping 10 minutes fast, only to find out that my CLOCK was 10 min slow, and the computer was being updated by a NNTP server.

[Slater]

my clock is now authsynchronising with: time.windows.com || time.nist.gov;

[Mithrandir]

I'd go with the nist.gov site primarily - only because I would suspect that lots of people go with the other, so your access time may be a bit off.