My clock is slow O_o

[Snives]

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 I'll buy a new battery tomorow.

 

[Airbot]

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]

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]

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

 

[Snives]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[mikinho]

Snives, two other things to try out:

1- Disable K8 Cool n Quiet in your BIOS

2- See if you have any "bad" Shell Extentions enabled. ShellExView - Shell Extension Manager For Windows. If you have any Codec Packs installed they tend to enable lots of crap, especially shell extentions. Bad shell extentions will make your entire system less responsive and in some cases loss of time.

 

[Snives]

Giving it a try Mikino. The only codec pack I had installed was Shark007's for testing playback of MKV, but it had some adverse effects so I removed it. The clock had been slow previous to installing it as well. I'm checking out ShellExView in a second and I'll edit or post back if I find anything.

Edit< Boo they won't let me give you any more rep yet Mik

 

[Snives]

Name :Bluewire General Property Sheet
Description : ContextH Application
Product : ContextH Application

This would be the only suspect extension on the list. All others are either from MS or nVidia (which is actually running on W7 WHQL drivers, so I'd assume the extensions should be safe as well). As for 'Bluewire', there are no exact hits on Google for that full name, and I have no idea what Bluewire is to assume what any other link would be.

Edit > According to FileInspectLibrary, BWContextHandler(the associated DLL) is safe.

 

[mikinho]

Giving it a try Mikino. The only codec pack I had installed was Shark007's for testing playback of MKV, but it had some adverse effects so I removed it. The clock had been slow previous to installing it as well. I'm checking out ShellExView in a second and I'll edit or post back if I find anything.

Edit< Boo they won't let me give you any more rep yet Mik

A little off-topic but for MKV playback all you need is Haali Media Spliiter. This is the latest Haali splitter for W7 (x86 & x64) that I know of is: http://haali.net/mkv/mkx.y.9.exe

When CoreAVC 2.0 is released with x64 support I'd recommend it as the decoder but until then the native H264 decoder works well enough

 

[copernicus]

It's not slow, it's just moving faster than the rest of the world!

 

[Snives]

I had avoided the new version of Haali because last I checked it was an unannounced beta, which generally isn't a good sign I'll give it a shot though. I had only gone with Shark's as a few random forums found on Google recommended it. I'm more a fan of MPC-HC + Haali + AC3 + FFDShow, a.k.a. CCCP. I've actually never played with CoreAVC as I've been told before it was primarily for low end systems and mine wouldn't benefit from it. If you are recommending it though, I'll give the new Haali a shot

 

[mikinho]

I had avoided the new version of Haali because last I checked it was an unannounced beta, which generally isn't a good sign I'll give it a shot though. I had only gone with Shark's as a few random forums found on Google recommended it. I'm more a fan of MPC-HC + Haali + AC3 + FFDShow, a.k.a. CCCP. I've actually never played with CoreAVC as I've been told before it was primarily for low end systems and mine wouldn't benefit from it. If you are recommending it though, I'll give the new Haali a shot

It is an unannouced beta still but it has come a long way from v1. I believe the only thing left is the shell extentions so I wouldn't recommend enabling that if you do try it out.

From what I've been told the official W7 version will be released simutaneous to CoveAVC (Haali does work for CoreAVC).

Sorry none of my suggestions have helped with your time loss. But if you do figure it out keep me posted.

 

[Snives]

Disabling CnQ had no effect either. I'm probably going to just let it be for a while, and wait to see if the guys in MS or ATI find something screwy on their end before final RTM, or worse case retail is sent out.

 

[dstruct2k]

Go into your BIOS and compare the stopwatch against the BIOS time; If that's also wrong, it could actually be a damaged quartz crystal on the motherboard. If that's right, but W7 is wrong, you're looking at a very strange software bug.

 

[Snives]

Good idea. I've only checked W7 vs. XP. Brb with results.

Edit > Clock in the BIOS is just fine. I'd say it's fair to call this a driver or compatability issue which I'll have to wait for MS/ATI/nVidia/Realtek/etc to correct. As a side note, I have just done a clean format, and currently only have XP x64 installed. I'll be putting a dual boot of W7 back on soon, but I might wait for the official RTM.