Windows ME clock loses time, bios clock ok

Customer's Windows ME system will start to lose time after being on for a few hours.

Checked motherboard battery and it appears fine at 3.1 volts (2032 coin cell).

Turned off power management in BIOS per Microsoft Knowledge base article. No affect on problem.

If he reboots the ME clock resets to the proper time (so I think that means the bios clock is keeping time properly).

What could cause the Windows clock to start to lose time? Customer claims it loses significantly, not just a few minutes, and gets worse as time passes. Other claim made is that the cursor starts to display erratically.

Did a full virus check with recent downloaded virus check data and system appears clean.

System is Athlon 800 on an Aus A7v mb.

antivirus program?

nortons antivirus 2000 was notorious for doing this. the problem got fixed with the later versions and they had a patch up for it too.

System has AVG installed, problem existed both before and after the AVG install so I don't think it is that. Installed AVG on many systems without any clock problems being reported.

Wondering if I should just reinstall ME? See if that affects the problem.

Someone was playing with this problem in the chatroom a while back... even changed the motherboard out, no effect.... however he didn't format and reinstall, so mebbe you will have better luck.


This may work for you too

Thanks for the suggestions NooNoo, that was the Knowledgebase Article I had read.

Turning off APM in the bios does not seem to help. I'll have to check out the screen savers to see if he has any activated.

The good news is that the article describes his symptom exactly "When you leave your computer on for an extended amount of time, the time may lose from two minutes to an hour per day.IMPORTANT: The CMOS does keep the correct time and if you restart the computer, the Windows clock is updated. Also, if you start your computer in Safe Mode, Windows does not lose time. "

Try the suggestions for a clean boot from the article...

Had problems with Intuit software. Try removing any Quicken/Quickbooks background apps like QBDAGENT. This fixed several of my client's problems.

My mom's computer has a similar problem. It's running windows 98 se. It can lose upwards of 15 minutes in a few hours, so after a day or so it can be over an hour off. It seems somewhat sporadic though in that it doesn't always lose time. I don't know what causes it, but I haven't really looked into it. It really isn't that much of a problem though.

If the machine is connected to the internet often enough, you could look into getting one of those programs that sync the computer's clock with the atomic clock in D.C. I should mention however that I have never tried any program of this sort personally and I don't know how badly it eats up system resources/bandwith and I don't know if it has any unwanted side effects.

I used to have the same problem on my Gateway p233 with win98. reformat and reinstall fixed it. I used to tell people that it was Einsteins theory of relativity. My computer was going so fast that time slowed down.

Turns out the culprit is devldr16.exe. It is a module from Creative for the Soundblaster card, specifically support for DOS legacy games.

Once we turned off the module by not loading it in msconfig startup the problems went away. Turned it back on and they come back. Module is not needed if you do not run any DOS legacy type of games.

A search on the module name in Google turns up more than one person has had problems exactly like this.

Thanks for all the suggestions, it was a tough nut to crack.

If you tried the suggested clean boot , you would have been able to determine this much sooner...:D

The way we found it was to do a safe mode boot - no problems even after a few hours.

Then we knew it was due to a loaded driver - and then had to start to selectively disable them, reboot see if the problem was still there or not, gradually adding in the drivers until we isolated the one causing the problem. Each test would take several hours as the problem would not show itself until after the system had been running for at least an hour. User had a fair number of modules being loaded in startup and did not want to have to pay me to sit there ruling them out one by one. He took over that task and eventually narrowed it down to devldr16.exe

Sure enough when you do a Google search on that module name you discover it causes exactly this problem in Windows ME.:sad:

I'm still tracking down this problem with someone.

In her case, she has a laptop running 98. The problem goes away when she pulls out her wireless NIC (Dlink).

For what it's worth, it still could be something else, though.

m