My laptop's taskbar clock is slow!

[Doug Beman]

I have a corporate laptop whose taskbar clock keeps losing minutes! It was accurate Friday (because I reset it to be) and this afternoon was almost 20 minutes behind legitimate EST!

DjB

[Schrullenhaft]

This can happen due to a variety of reasons. From power saving features to non-standard clock speeds to CMOS chips that aren't as accurate as they should be. Sometimes it could be a CMOS battery (this can be true if it keeps on 'losing' more time more often (or quicker).

You can check out the manufacturer website (assuming that is is good) and see if there is an FAQ or questions from other customers about this particular phenomenon. Rarely, a BIOS update may fix this problem, but it's usually a hardware problem (that might not have an easy solution).

There's a slight chance that it may be software, but this usually isn't the case with such problems.

[ July 15, 2002, 04:12 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[JMcGuire]

Is it losing time, or is it always just incorrect? Since it's a corporate laptop, they may have you set to time synch with a server that's slow. This is happening to me now -- on my company-provided laptop I'm required to time-synch with the servers at the home office -- which are all 11 minutes slow. I guess they figure if all 65,000 of us are 11 minutes slow, it won't matter as much. LOL

How old is the laptop?

[Doug Beman]

The system is about 1 year old. I have watched it today, and somewhere between noon and now it's lost over 20 minutes. I didn't shut down/restart in that time; it was in constant use. It was connected to the AC power adapter.

DjB