My clock is slow O_o

Snives · 20 Jul 2009

So... After being 40 minutes late for dinner plans even though I left right when I was planning according to my clock I decided to check out the clock. When I ran a stopwatch against the windows date/time clock in the system tray the windows time only progressed 18 seconds while real time had been ~50 seconds. Any ideas? I've actually never in my years of building/selling/etc ever had a clock run slow, lol.

>Edit Just checked around, apparently this is normally caused by a dying CMOS battery. Yay for DFI backing my settings up so I don't need to reconfig all my BIOS :P I'll buy a new battery tomorow.

Airbot · 20 Jul 2009

hi Snives,

Could be your cmos battery (coin) dying. Could be your time isn't syncing with the internet time server. You could try setting it to a different server from the list. Right click on the clock - Internet time -Change Settings - pick a different one. See if it helps, or maybe replace your cmos battery.
How to replace the CMOS battery.

Edit - looks like you figured it out on your own as I was writing this.

Good luck to you.

Snives · 20 Jul 2009

Ha yeah, I tried switching to another server as well as disabling sync, so I figure the CMOS battery is a decent bet. Thanks for the input. I just would have never thought about that without reading it because I wouldn't think the battery would matter while the system is powered. I thought the battery only played a role while it was on standby power/disconnected.

Airbot · 20 Jul 2009

No problem, yeah, it could be just failing for some reason, bad/old or something. Let us know how it goes. :)

Snives · 21 Jul 2009

Well, changing the battery didn't have any effect. It is still running at 1/3 the speed of a proper clock. The clock in XP (dualbooted) however is functioning properly. I'm going to just toss it up to hardware incompatability or some other odd little thing MS has to finish fixing before they release to retail, I'm not going to spend the 30+ hours fighting with the clock like I did trying to just get W7 to a halfway functional speed.

zigzag3143 · 21 Jul 2009

Snives said:

Well, changing the battery didn't have any effect. It is still running at 1/3 the speed of a proper clock. The clock in XP (dualbooted) however is functioning properly. I'm going to just toss it up to hardware incompatability or some other odd little thing MS has to finish fixing before they release to retail, I'm not going to spend the 30+ hours fighting with the clock like I did trying to just get W7 to a halfway functional speed.

hey if you schedule a task for a certain time does it launch on time or late?

Ken

Snives · 21 Jul 2009

I'll schedule one and check.

I have one scheduled for 5 minutes from now according to the clock, stopwatch running against it to see if it starts in 5 minutes or when the windows clock catches up. I'd suspect the latter.

I'm guessing you want to check if the issue is W7 internal clock or just the displayed time?

mikinho · 21 Jul 2009

I'd do a couple things:

1- Update the polling interval using the below registry key. This will help resync your time until you figure out what is causing it to lose time.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient SpecialPollInterval

I'd recommend using 21600 (6 hours), anything more and you risk being banned.
The run the below command to tell the service that config changes were made. Alternatively you can restart the servce.

w32tm /config /update

2- Take a look at pool.ntp.org: the internet cluster of ntp servers. I'd highly recommend using one of their regional pools instead of any of the ntp sources provided by default.

If you are using any of the standard time sources there is a good chance they are overloaded and will time out for you. Microsoft's default time.windows.com and Apple's time.apple.com are both saturated.

In terms of why it is drifting. If you are losing time w/o rebooting the computer then it is probably your software clock that is having problems, not the hardware. Both have separate timing references though they get sync'd

Basically if interrupt 0 doesn't get "hit" often enough, the clock will lose time. Some causes are:

- Poorly written older screensavers running on Vista can cause this.
- Some AMG systems prior to running the AMD Dual-Core Optimizer
- Poorly written drivers that lock interrupts.

Do you have any unknown devices in your Device Manager? Any errors in your System event log?

Snives · 21 Jul 2009

Well, the scheduled alert just popped up, and it was 16:30 on the stopwatch, although the appropriate time according to the windows clock.

@Mikinho
I'll do the registry changes in a minute, thanks for the tip. Atleast that way it won't fall days behind.

1)I have screensavers disabled (I always do this when I'm testing things)
2)The DCO was intended for windows XP users, and doesn't apply to the Phenom generation hardware from what I have read. Supposedly AMD corrected the issue that the DCO was masking.
3)I'm leaning towards drivers or internal conflct myself. I just won't trust the clock in W7 until official drivers are released for my chipset/sound/lan, as currently they as the former is running under a Vista driver and the other two under windows default drivers as no W7 versions are available and the Vista drivers caused serious issues.

edit > No unknown devices, and the only error on log was from 1AM (10 hours ago) from the video driver.

mikinho · 21 Jul 2009

Yep AMD fixed the issue, I was just mentioning some reasons that I know of.

My guess would be drivers as well, especially if some are using Vista driver sets. Keep us updated though if you do find out anything else.