Thinkpads Forum

I've noticed that the clock (bottom right corner of the screen) on my X220 is always running fast.
I have it set to sync with the internet, but I've seen it up to 15 minutes fast.
Whenever I notice it's off, I've gone ahead & manually synced to correct it.
I just adjusted the registry so it will sync daily instead of weekly. Hopefully this will end the problem.
Just thought I'd put this up here in case others have experienced the same problem.
If anyone has an idea for a 'proper' fix, please let me know.

Thanks..

I've had a strange problem with my desktop, somewhat the same issue, but the clock was 34 minutes faster.
I tried to sync it but it would reset every start up.
Didn't make sense, but I guess I had a bad Win7 update somewhere.

My registry fix didn't help. Laptop still gains time & won't correct itself by connecting automatically to one of the internet time clocks.
Between the time I did the registry hack & now (11 days) the computers clock has gained 12 minutes.
Does anyone have a clue what might be happening?

After syncing the time, go into BIOS and check the time there to see whether it is set properly.

Recently I had a similar problem that the system clock would be several hours off after boot. Turns out that a registry hack I was using to set the BIOS clock to UTC (RealTimeIsUniversal) prevents Windows from modifying the BIOS clock after time sync, therefore the correct time is not set in BIOS even though the system clock is synced correctly.

My best guess is that there's two things going on:

1) The real time clock (RTC) on the motherboard is not functioning correctly. The clock is dependent upon the accuracy of an oscillator circuit that is set to a typical value of 32.768Khz. That circuit is based on a crystal and some resistors and capacitors. If any one of those components are out of spec, then the clock will run too fast or too slow. If that's the case, there's not much you can to to easily correct the circuit; there's no "knob" that you can adjust to tune the oscillator to the correct frequency. One could verify this as being the problem by using a frequency counter to measure the oscillator. One other possibility might be to run the PC Doctor for DOS diagnostic as it contains a RTC test module. I believe that there was a version released for the X220 but I don't have the resources at my fingertips at the moment to confirm. The factory would say that in order to fix the problem you would have to change the motherboard.

2) Windows failure to properly set/reset the system time to an internet time server could be due to a number of reasons. With that being said, I use a freely available utility program called DS Clock to keep my systems in sync with eBay time . DS Clock can be set to query one of any number of internet time servers as often as every hour. It can also be programmed to float above any window so you can always have the time displayed (in several different time zones if you want). You can get the program here: http://www.dualitysoft.com/dsclock/