Date & Time malfunction

Looks like your CMOS battery is malfunction. Replace it.

Having recently changed the battery (still a day or two behind), is there another possible solution to this problem? Thank you.

It might be a problem with some programs you are running.  Many old games, mostly dos, use the system timer to control the speed to their game.  Unfortunatly, they can change how often the timer sounds.  It can be made to go up to 15 times slower.  Normaly the program will reset the timer, but not the clock.  Some of them don't even reset the timer, so your clock will run slower than normal until you reboot.  This is only a possible answer, and there isn't much you can do to fix it if this is the cause.

Post here your mother boards model and bios.

Reset the BIOS which will refresh the CMOS clock

Hope this doesn't sound too silly, are you using the correct time zone?

It can happen

If all the previous don't apply, that is if it still runs slow if you don't use the computer for a few days, if the computer is switched off, if you disabled all the suspective programs etc. than very probably the realtime-clock chip is broken.

These chips are extremely sensitive to static charges (because of their low-current design) and break down very easy.  I replaced quite a few of these chips in my pc-service-engineer  years...

thank you for all your help, i will look into the computer chip as recommended by joopv.

for a cost effective remedy try edit of autoexec.bat enter a new line with     time      on only
each time you start computer you will be prompted to input
new time    (with old time displayed)
any time stamp will, then, not be far out.