MSI athlon motherboard very bad at keeping time

[jasonjm]

heya alll

was wondering what it could be? my computer gains about 10 mins every hour, and then atomic clock syncs it... very annoying!

K7T266 Pro2U is the model - is my CMOS battery bad maybe? although I get no boot errors in bios or anywhere else?

The motherboard is about 1 year old and plugged into a UPS.... any ideas? this is driving me nuts

 

[DieHardware]

What OS? For how much CMOS batteries cost I'd replace it.

 

[Kalvin00]

Yeah, definetely change the CMOS battery first.

 

[KF]

I thought the Real Time Clock just kept time like any digital clock. It divides some oscillator down until it gets seconds, minutes, hours, days. In order for it to lose/gain time, the oscillator has to be off frequency. If the battery were bad, I think it would lose time or stop.

You could try resetting the CMOS or reflashing the BIOS in case the RTC is programmable.

 

[Peter]

Is it losing time while it runs, or while it's off? The CMOS battery is only active while the thing is off. When it's losing time while on, where the time is kept by software (from the timer interrupt if you care), you should check for high load background tasks or parasites.

 

[jasonjm]

windows XP corporate

and the computer gains about 10 mins every hour while its ON, while its off it seems ok actually....

If i don't set rockettime to go out onto the internet to sync every hour, by evening my clock is more than 1 hour fast! doh

I am very careful with my computer, I dont have any viruses, trojans, spyware etc etc, even at home I am behind a commercial cisco PIX firewall....

I will try flashing the bios if there is a newer one available

 

[Peter]

That'll be a software problem then, an OS software problem to be precise. BIOS doesn't do the timekeeping while XP is running.
You can narrow it down by booting to DOS and letting it sit there. If still too fast, then most probably the system timer's base clock is off track. Is that system overclocked?
If it's OK in DOS, then something in your XP is screwed up.

 

[jasonjm]

yeah trust XP to be screwed up

grrrrr

The system is not overlocked at all....

I will try the DOS idea, see how that goes, thanks for the idea

I actually have a dual boot, I'll also try booting into win2k and see if the same thing happens. Win2k is a better OS anyways, just doesnt have all the cool features.

BTW, found a BIOS update from 3.5 to 3.7

 

[ebaycj]

Are you a member of a domain (or trying to use a network time utility that gradually adjusts time)?

This sounds like what is happening. NTP, i believe, behaves like this when there are large changes to be made in a system's time. It makes small changes over a long period of time in order to minimize 'gaps' in file dates/times. This coincides with the fact that your system only loses time when it is booted into windows (and doesnt lose time when it is off), as well as the fact that it is losing the same amount of time per hour, every hour.

I'd say figure out what is doing this, and kill it.

PS - if you are a domain member, it is probably trying to sync to the domain W32Time server, which is often but not always the domain controller itself. To stop this, change the clocks on all your domain machines to match the atomic clock and you will be okay.


ebaycj

 

[jasonjm]

update: since BIOS update so far so good!

maybe that fixed things for me