That was a pretty impressive response on how to keep your clock in sync when not connected to a lan - but I am afraid I haven't explained correctly.
I can't use any of these alternate sync methods.
I want to add corrections to the clock so that it doesn't drift off SO MUCH. So for example, while I am using NTP, NTP sees that my clock is too fast. So NTP (or something) puts a correction on my clock to slow it down.
Then when NTP is no longer available, the clock drifts off, but it drifts off much more slowly than it did before the correction was applied.
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You want to calculate the rate of difference of the machine's clock and have adjustments programmatically made every now and then, using that known rate of difference? There's no guarantee that the difference follows a linear pattern, which would throw off estimates. I also don't know of any program that would do this.
If your mobo's clock drift that much, you must have some issues with your mobo itself. I'm not sure how much a "normal" deviation of a system clock to the "real" or NTP based (atomic?) clock, but I would think it will be in seconds difference in sat, 1 year? If your system deviates a considerable time than the "normal", it must be a mobo problem. A frequency generator perhaps? My suggestion is just to replace the mobo.
Good luck...
Time drift on some systems is just plain bad, its not that there is anything 'wrong' other than the particular board's internal timer is crappy. The plus is that often it is fairly linear. I regularly deal with a few older systems that will fall behind by as much as a minute or two in a week. It is pretty annoying.
Anyway windows has a programming function that will allow you to adjust the clock cycle in 100 nanosecond increments so that you can essentially make each second slightly longer/shorter to try to reduce the drift in your clock. The details of the SetSystemTimeAdjustment() call can be found here,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/
Making a program to make this adjustment is trivial, but you will need to use a outside source at some point to calculate how much you need to adjust the clock cycles by.
One problem is that if the computer is shut off the adjustment will be lost and must be re-applied when you restart. Though you could just re-apply the same adjustment you would also need to adjust for the drift of the onboard clock for the time that the system was shut off.
There is a freeware app, TimeSync, that will pull the time from the network and then do some calculations and adjust your clock speed for you. But again if you reboot it would need to be re-run.
http://www.luziusschneider
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by: sparkmakerPosted on 2006-09-15 at 19:24:58ID: 17533744
So in essence you would like to harness the sorrections and manually set them in order to compute the changes you have made against the NTP, thereby giving you more control over the system clock if you can compute this "drift".