Aceshardware

Im having an annoying problem with a machine which internal clock is going completely wrong. I'm talking about up to 2 hours off per day ! I thought it was a timezone or daylight saving thing initially, but its not.

As a band aid, I have it resynch its time with a time server every hour now, but this is still a bit of a headache as log files get messed up and some apps dont like the clock being changed continually.

Does anyone have a clue what would cause such massive clock drift? Is the motherboard dying? Im assuming it can't have anything to do with the cmos battery, or ?

1: Replace battery

really? I would have expected a dead battery to make it forget its settings or clock once powered off, but the machine is on 24/7, does it use the battery to power its clock ? That seems absurd. It shouldn't even need a battery if its on.

It has nothing to do with the battery as I expected. I replaced it for fun, but no change.

I downloaded "Domain Time" trial program which corrects the clock and displays charts of clock drift and other nifty stuff. When the machine is iddle, the clock isn't drifting. Its only when its being used. So Im guessing it has something to do with Cool&Quiet (its an A64). C&Q didnt work on the motherboard, so I got it working using RMClock. But even disabling it and keeping the cpu at 1 or 2GHz it still drifts (BADLY). So Im confused :?:

Have you thought about setting your ntp interval to something very high, such as 5 or 10 minutes?

Well, "domain time" is now resynching the clock as often as is needed to keep the clock within 1 minute. (The program is actually designed to keep clocks within milliseconds lol, so rather than slowing/speeding up the clock to make the adjustment I had to override it to make it change the clock immediately, otherwise it couldn't keep up with the drift lol).

Anyway, this means its updating roughly every 3- 5 minutes. That works as a bandaid, but Id like to cure it in a more robust way.

New Motherboard (and/or CPU) :) Think of it as Karmic wisdom instructing you to upgrade.

The machine is only used to play music, movies and skype in my bedroom. Im not going to upgrade it if I can avoid it, its horribly overspecced already lol. Besides, its a nifty nonstandard DVD size box, I can't just replace the MB i think.

Read this thread yesterday but something sprung to mind as I re-read today.
I once had some odd time behaviour after a bad install of windows. I think everything went too quickly in my case, including playing music/watching videos/playing games/etc.

Worth booting off some sort of livecd & seeing if you observe the same behaviour?

Sounds like a system interupt issue. Windows doesn't handle the clock all that well in older versions as it is, but even the latest ignore the system time and try to guess the real time based on cycles. Some hardware level tasks are not measured very well and cause the clock to skew off course. Regular reboots should help.

Are you using an ethernet connection through your usb port?

Thats a good idea. I'll give that a shot this week. However, it works fine during the night, and Im still not sure what it is that is different at night that it runs properly then. Even if I don't use it during the day, it goes off. Same software running.

The only 2 things I can think off that is different is that I have a Skype connection on usually at night (don't ask), and in the morning I usually set up a remote desktop connection to it from my main linux box. I tried disconnecting it for an hour, but the clock still went berserk during that time.



No, just a regular onboard ethernet. But now that you mention it, the machine hasn't been rebooted in weeks now (hey, XP can do that too if you barely use it :p ). Still it has to be related to something I do at night and don't do during the day apparently. Maybe I should go sleep next to it during the day and see if that cures it LOL.