I have a Pentium II PC running under Windows 98. One of its features is a small clock in the corner of the screen. The clock was off by about fifteen minutes for a long time but I never worried about it. However, a couple of days ago I noticed that it was off by an hour and a half. I reset it by my watch, but today it is once again off by a half an hour. I leave my PC running and to the best of my knowledge there’s been no power interuptions in my apartment. The incorrect time isn’t a concern in itself (I use my watch to check the time) but I’m worried that this might be an indication of a more serious problem. Can anyone offer any free tech support?
The lithium battery on your motherboard sounds like it needs to be replaced. Take it out (It’s a little silver disc), go to Radio Shack ans show it to the clerk and he’ll sell you a new one.
PC clocks are notoriously inaccurate. I saw a shareware program that called up the National Bureau of Standards and set your PC time with the hydrogen or lithium clock or whatever they use and have to update by 1/2 second every 10 years.
How long did it take your clock to lose or gain half an hour?
Woah. Don’t just take out that battery. It will reset your CMOS and all sorts of other potentially bad things. Just stay a little late until someone can find out how to back up your settings so that you dont have an aneurism in the animal brain of your computer. I’ll take a look when I’m not soused.
It’s supposed to be a five-year battery at least, so there is at least a chance I’ll be sober by then.
carnivorousplant said
NIST has the software called ACTS. I downloaded a program called Nistimew from that site a year or two ago. It doesn’t appear to be availible from NIST any more. I use it to reset my clock about once a month.
my PC clock did this for years, which makes me think it has nothing to do with the battery. Plus if your battery was low the CMOS should be giving you checksum errors or other problems during boot up, so if it isn’t I’d leave it alone for the moment.
The problem went away when I flash-upgraded my BIOS. Doing this carries a very slight risk of killing your BIOS and leaving you with a dead computer, so I’d suggest you just live with it!
One other thing - some old DOS games can change the time on your computer clock - DOOM for example. Have you been blasting away with your plasma rifle?
Little Nemo,
It is higly possible that your BIOS or Real Time Clock is off.
How much do you know about computers? What are the specs on your computer?
Give us more information and I bet one of us techs on the board can give a definative answer.
< not edited for spelling or typos >
I had an old P-233 I was going to give to my brother that had the same problem. I took the battery out, and replaced it and the clock worked fine there after. I thought I was going to have to change BIOS settings and such, but the computer booted up perfectly. Of course, your milage may vary.
I had a similar problem with my clock. A geek friend scared me, informing me that this indicated problems with fairly basic and therefor very important computer functions.
The problem has however appeared to have fixed itself when I reset the clock auto reset itself for daylight saving recently and has been fine ever since.
Since I occasionally induldge…just what does Doom do to your PC clock?
Try microsoft.com search for ‘slow clock’. They make your operating system, they know what to do.
Probably what you did was you used the old HD & put it in a new computer so it doesn’t have the timing software so you have to reinstall W98 …
The way to know its that is turn it off & then on, if the time is right, thats probably it.
Did you check the DOS time? Did you check the CMOS time? The W98 clock is a software clock.
Thanks everyone for your suggestions, even though I’m not sure I follow all of them. I had considered the possibility that my battery was wearing out for instance and was hoping there was an easy way to check this (something like a DOS “batterycheck” command). I’m also familiar with the concept of BIOS; they’re the things Eve writes, although I’m not sure how that applies to my clock. I’ve no idea what a CMOS is.
To answer other questions; I haven’t been playing DOOM or any other games recently, I don’t know when I lost the 90 minutes but the 30 minute loss occurred within less than two days, my clock did automatically reset itself for DST last month (I was online when it happened), I didn’t transfer my hard drive from another computer (and I’ve been using this one for over two years), I haven’t installed any new software recently, and pretty much all I know about the specs of my computer is what I wrote in my OP (it was a store built model so it doesn’t even have a brand).
Y’all are correct in that PC clocks can be amazingly inaccurate, even straight from the factory. Years ago, I read an article that explained that PC clocks aren’t held to the same standards as watches, since timekeeping isn’t a PC’s primary function. Therefore, while a watch can’t lose more than a few seconds a month to be considered acceptable, a PC clock can gain or lose up to six minutes a month and still be considered acceptable. Standards may have changed, but I doubt it; still, manufacturing has improved to the point that flaky clocks are usually not an issue.
Another note about the National Standards folks: I believe they use an atomic clock that keeps time to the vibration of a cesium atom, which means it loses about 1 second every 300 years. Very regular, those cesium atoms.
They must eat a diet high in fiber. :rolleyes:
Well, this is interesting. The help index in Win98 has a topic on setting the “low battery alarm.” It says to click on the “alarms” tab in the Power Management Properties dialog box. Unfortunately, there is no alarms tab on that dialog box.
bibliophage, that’s for a laptop battery. Do you have a laptop & a battery?
My first PC (Gateway) lost a few minutes each day! I used a shareware program called RighTime to automatically correct it. It worked fine, but as clearly noted in its documentation, it did interfere with some things. I did have to disable it to play Doom and to install some programs from diskette. RighTime and other shareware programs to correct the clock are still available.
There are any number of shareware programs available to set your PC clock from NIST. I think they still provide a list of some of them somewhere on their site. You can also search ZDNet or CNet.
Dimension 4 is a popular one, but I don’t use it because it just sets the PC clock and doesn’t report the amount the PC clock was off.
PrimaSoft Date/Time is freeware. It’s basic and easy to use. It displays the NIST time before setting your clock. The only problem is it doesn’t recognize the daylight savings time dates correctly, but you can manually adjust it.
World Time sets the clock, logs the correction, and has lots of other features, such as customizing multiple time displays for different time zones.
Interesting. Sounds to me like running a DOS program in a Windows environment shuts down the clock for the duration you’re in there. That would certainly explain why my computer is slow on the time.
The real tekkies are probably going to pick holes in this,but still…
all the BIOS settings stored in your computer used to be stored in a CMOS memory. This requires a constant very small power supply, so the battery both kept the clock running with the power off and kept all your BIOS settings stored. So I thought if your battery was getting low, there should be other symptoms since the CMOS would fail to store settings. It’s also a good reason not to take the battery out unless you’re sure you need to.
I’m not sure this is still true of modern BIOSes. Many seem to autodetect all the hardware every time you boot up, so it wouldn’t give errors even if your battery was low. Or maybe they use a non-volatile memory for BIOS settings.
As for DOOM, me and a lot of friends were running it under old MS-DOS on 486’s and it screwed the clocks every time on every PC without fail. I have no idea why.
I used to do this too, but it never messed up my clock. I played DOOM using only the PC speaker for a long time before I got a sound card. This was on a Gateway 486 with MSDOS and Win3.1.
In the pre-sound card era, there was a small MSDOS program going the rounds that you could use to play melodies through the PC speaker from the command prompt. If you used it “as is” (clock interrupts allowed), you got gargly-sounding tones because, obviously, clock processing interrupted the timing loop. If you modified it to disallow clock interrupts, you got nice tones, but the clock stopped and lost time while the program ran.
As I mentioned above, I had to disable RighTime before running DOOM (with the PC speaker). If I didn’t, the game intro would run very slowly, and the intro roars came out as very long strings of very short tones! If this happened I always cancelled the game ASAP. QBASIC had similar problems when it had to deal with the PLAY instruction.
I’m not a super-tech and I’m not clear on the details for this next part, so if I’m spouting idiocies, please be gentle.
To get barely adequate sounds through the PC speaker, DOOM reprogrammed the clock chip to 4 times the usual rate. QBASIC did something similar to play its melodies. Both must have had some internal programming to keep track of the time correctly.
Maybe your machines had an off-brand BIOS or a MSDOS not customized for them which DOOM couldn’t handle 100% properly and so it screwed up the clocks.