Clock Loses Time

I'm wondering if anyone else has the problem of the clock down in the right hand corner losing time after you've had your computer running for several hours? Mine loses a little time over several hours even if I'm not signed online. If I'm downloading music or playing games or etc it loses time at a quicker rate it seems. Maybe a couple of minutes or so after four or five hours but if I've left my computer on all night when I go to work, I get home in the morning and it's about 10 to 15 minutes slow so I re-boot and it goes back to the right time. What can be causing this and what can I do to remedy it? This is a new computer and it has done it from day one. My old computer did the same thing however.

Thanks for any help you might give me! I appreciate it!



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Leigh Ann (AttaGirl42)

How old is this computer? Could be the battery is dying out.

Changing your Computer's battery

How to replace the CMOS battery

THIS sounds more like it....... HERE read this quote on this page....
"When you leave your computer on for an extended amount of time, the time may lose two minutes up to an hour per day."




[This message has been edited by Artanis (edited 10-20-2001).]

The easiest way to check your cmos battery is to check and see if the time corrects when you reboot. There are three time keeping devices in your machine and Windows is one of them. It could be Windows, it could be the bios or it could be the link between the two, here is a copy of a description of the process as explained to me by Dell.


The REAL TIME CLOCK (RTC) is located on the system board and powered by the CMOS battery. It should be consistently updated even if the system is not receiving AC power. If you turn the system off at night and back on in the morning, the RTC should still have the correct time and date.

The CMOS CLOCK is a logical clock stored in the BIOS chip on the system board. Its settings are maintained (but not updated) in non-volatile RAM while the system is powered off.

The OPERATING SYSTEM CLOCK (OS) is a logical clock stored in system memory. This clock is cleared each time the system is powered off or rebooted.

When a computer is powered on, the CMOS clock synchronizes with the RTC during the POST (Power On Self Test) operation. When Windows is loaded it reads the current time from the CMOS clock and maintains its own, essentially independent, OS clock. The OS clock does not synchronize again with the CMOS clock unless the OS clock is manually changed (at which time both the CMOS clock and RTC are set to the time stored in the OS clock), or the system is rebooted. Therefore, the OS clock may hold an incorrect time if running tasks slow down the operating system scheduler, while the CMOS clock and RTC will continue to maintain the correct time.

Atta, when I had my dial-up software installed, mine lost up to 10 minutes a day, when I switched to DSL and different software, the problem went away.