Dell 9400 Losing Time! Help

Hi,

My dell 9400 has recently developed a very annoying problem. The main time in windows xp loses a time and after resetting it, after only a few minutes it will already be 5 seconds slower.

This is extremely annoying as I use the laptop as a pvr and over a period of a couple of days the time will be several minutes slow.

I have set it to update from the internet but again after this happens it just continues to lose time again.

It never use to happen like this and certainly not at this rate!

Does anybody have an idea what the fault could be, software, hardware?

Thanks

 

im not sure what exactly your asking

 

the clock is probably run off a watch battery or something similar on your motherboard. i'm not sure if you can change it or not in a laptop. hopefully somebody with more knowledge can answer that. i'm sure most laptops you can, but the difficulty will vary greatly.

 

The CMOS battery shouldn't make a difference because its either holding time or it isn't. Especially if your laptop is plugged in this shouldn't cause any issues. What I would start with is upgrade your BIOS to the newest available one, and we can go from there.

 

I'm not positive, but I would change the CMOS battery for starters. A weak battery could cause weird behavior

 

Encoding video can use a lot of processor time. If your CPU is bogged down, the actual clock will seem to fall behind because the clock uses the processor cycles to mark time when the computer is up and running. Whats amazing is that you have a dual core processor and this is still happening. Do you have anything else like Seti@home or some other cluster project working the CPU in the background when you aren't using the computer? It could have something to do with power management properties or antivirus scans, etc as well.

There is somewhere in the Registry that you can go in and tell Windows to sync the clock via the internet every couple hours if you wanted to.

 

^ never ever heard of the cpu keeping track of system time.

 

Windows only picks up the time from the Cmos when you boot up. After that it is the computer keeping track.

*

Some website I just looked up said to make sure APM (Advanced Power Management) is off in the bios, and to let Windows do the APM stuff.

 

It is not losing time whilst turned off it only loses it whilst running xp.

I will have to look into what processes are running behind the scenes also check the antivirus and firewall, as this has only started to happen a couple of weeks ago!

Thanks for the tips. Please if you have anymore.

Also anybody know how i can get the system time in xp to auto update from the internet every hour or so? that would be useful. At the moment it does it every few days and by that time the system is several minutes slow!

Thanks

 

I think it is the following,

Go into your registry (run regedit), then go; HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/W32Time/UpdateInterval

Its in seconds and should say something like 360000 which is like 100 hours. If you change it to 3600 thats once an hour I think. When you modify it make sure you modify it in decimal and not hexadecimal (Unless you know the conversion between the two).