Losing Time

[bistro]

Hey guys. I'm refurbishing a HP Pavilion dv6426 laptop and am pretty much done. Just got one problem...and I'm stumped for a solution (happens once every quarter-century).

Running Windows 7 32-bit. If I let it run for about an hour, I notice that Windows clock loses time....let it run for longer than that and it loses a LOT of time. The CMOS battery is brand new and CMOS time has remained correct. I also made sure that the clock has permissions to go through the Windows firewall to synch with internet time. When I shut down the system and let it sit for awhile, the Windows clock is WAY behind the CMOS clock when booted up again. I don't have any fancy apps running in the background or screensavers to use up resources (laptop only has 2GB RAM). Using AVG Free antivirus.

I've always fancied being a time traveler and go into the past, but not this way. Any clues?

[SuperSparks]

Here's a KB article that may help:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189706

[bistro]

Thanks, SuperSparks. I cracked up over that last Microsoft "advice" to turn off the antivirus and system utilities.

What an excellent idea, Micropoop! What genius on your staff thought of THAT one?

[bistro]

Well....still messing with it. I got a bad feeling that they sent me a bad CMOS battery...ordered another one. If that doesn't work, then it may be a problem with the mobo itself. I've tried a third-party time keeper, but it doesn't seem to be able to fix the problem.

Maybe I can use this as an excuse to my wife to go get that high-speed, low drag gaming laptop I've had my eye on. Hmmmmmmm....

[SuperSparks]

A workaround, if you can't get to the root cause, would be to change the interval that Windows updates the time from a time server. In

HK_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient

Change the value of SpecialPollInterval to the number of seconds required between updates.

[Train]

Clean the battery contacts and the battery itself too.
Pencil erasure time again.

[Welshjim]

bistro--Sometimes the sync service you use is not working properly. That happened to me a few weeks ago. I switched to time.nist.gov which works well.

[SuperSparks]

Or there is a list here:

Public NTP Time Servers

I've found all the default time servers in Windows to be somewhat unreliable

[Train]

I have found time-a.nist.gov works fine for me. It is in the dropdown as is time-b.nist.gov in Win 7

A list of them .
http://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi

Just copy and paste into that window if you wish to add a site and it will be remembered. Until you do a clean install or remove it from the regs.