Clock skew on T410

[srunni]

Hi,

I've got a fairly new (few months old) T410, and recently I've started experiencing clock skew. There are 2 possible causes (I haven't gotten the time to test them out yet):

1. No AC power

2. No internet access on boot

#2 is possible because I always sync the time using NTP on boot if I have internet access (i.e., ethernet). Since most of the time that I have ethernet, I also have AC power, it's difficult to tell the reason without specifically looking for it.

Anyway, does anyone have ideas as to why this would suddenly start happening on a few-months-old laptop?

Thanks!

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

you mean the internal clock is out of sync with the internet clock? how minutes are you losing or gaining per day?

[srunni]

Yes, after being disconnected from an AC power source for 6 hours today, it was behind by 15 mins.

[trekuhl]

from BIOS or windows? and when one is off (say windows) and you reboot and go into BIOS is it also same? 

-windows will grab BIOS time if it doesnt have another source

-windows could be grabbing bad time from NTP

  -how often does it sync

  -have you done the command line options to resync NTP see if it corrects time and thus skew is from internal clock

    -w32tm  /resync or other options http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc773263(WS.10).aspx even simple like                    restarting time service?

[srunni]

---

trekuhl wrote:

from BIOS or windows? and when one is off (say windows) and you reboot and go into BIOS is it also same? 

-windows will grab BIOS time if it doesnt have another source

-windows could be grabbing bad time from NTP

  -how often does it sync

  -have you done the command line options to resync NTP see if it corrects time and thus skew is from internal clock

    -w32tm  /resync or other options http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc773263(WS.10).aspx even simple like                    restarting time service?

---

I'm running Linux and that's where I saw the skew. I haven't checked the BIOS yet; I'll do that tomorrow, after I've had it disconnected from AC power for a few hours.

I have an NTP daemon run on boot and set the hardware time on shutdown. Of course, if there is no internet connection on boot, it doesn't get checked and the BIOS time is used instead.

[trekuhl]

figure out if its the BIOS losing time?

[srunni]

Looks like it's not, so I'm guessing it's the software. I'll see what the distro support channels have to say.