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#1
Clock Stops Running When System Not In Use
Hello all,
The company I work for sells POS systems and software for restaurants to use to run their business. We've sold hundreds without any real issues, but there is one particular customer of ours who keeps having an odd problem that is making us a bit bonkers.
The systems are pretty run of the mill PC's running Windows 7 Embedded (I can get specs if needed). The system this customer is using has been having clock sync issues for the last few months and we've been grappling with it on and off. Our first assumption was that the CMOS battery was dead, but we swapped that and then even swapped the system entirely, but the issue continues. It isn't the restaurant software they're running because we have lots of other customers using the same software/combo with no issue. I don't believe it's malware either because we even gave them a brand new, clean system and the issue returned.
It was a bit difficult to track what on earth was going on (since we had to do it remotely and the customer isn't great with computers) but we believe what is happening is that the clock seems to stop running around the time they close for the break between lunch and dinner and when they close at night. We thought it might have something to do with the sleep mode, but that has always been disabled.
Basically, it seems like after the system is left idle for a while (at least 30 minutes it appears) the clock just seems to stop counting up and resumes once they re-open and start using the system again. I've scoured the net for weeks on and off for information that might help, but most of the time the issue seems to be caused by a dead CMOS battery, and I don't think that's the case here.
I did see occasional mentions that routers might cause issues with the Windows clock, but I haven't been able to find anything elaborating on why that might be.
I've tried creating a task in the Task Scheduler to force the clock to check-in with the time servers once an hour so maybe we can brute force it into staying in sync, but that seems to fail after a few days.
So I guess my question is: What's causing our poor customer's clock to constantly go out of sync?
Short version: Clock keeps going out of sync, definitely not the CMOS battery, looking for other possible causes.