Bill said:
On a tbird-900, when the computer starts, the time is ok but it
doesn't keep syncro it looses almost 10 minutes in a day while the
machine is running. Every time you shut down the machine it gives the
right time on startup.
The hardware clock is accurate to within a few minutes per year. That
is the clock that is used to set the time when the OS loads. After the
OS loads, the hardware clock is no longer used. The OS uses its own
clock. Programs that can place a high stress on a host will result in
not enough timeslices allocated to the time routine to update the OS
clock. So what you run in your OS can result in the OS' clock getting
off. That's why you use a time sync program running as a service or
background utility to keep your OS clock in sync.
The time sync service in Windows is very poor regarding its granularity.
It may not sync to an NTP server for many days, sometimes even up to a
week, or more. There is no configuration of the Windows Time service as
to how often it does a sync. Also, the default is to use Microsoft's
NTP server but that is overly busy and hasn't been designed to handle
the load so it could quite a while before it syncs your OS clock. You
can edit the registry to add more NTP servers to the list so you can
select a different NTP server used by the Windows Time service but that
doesn't alter the long intervals between when it will sync your OS
clock.
Start looking into getting a time sync utility. Some of them will even
find which ones have the least latency in synchronizing time to your
host. Just because an NTP server is physically close to your location
doesn't mean it is the one with least network delay. My university's
NTP server has longer latency than another NTP server a couple of states
away. I use Socketwatch. Not free and you will need to update their
servers.lst file to get rid of dead entries (I used the stratum 1 and 2
NTP servers list from
http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/WebHome to
create a new servers list (using only the public servers from their
list, and only bothered with those that were within my country although
Socketwatch would find the top 5 with least latency). There are plenty
of time sync programs, some free and some not.
