[Gllug] Fedora/Dell Clock Problems

[Dave Cross]

Dave Cross wrote:
> I've got a Dell Dimension 5100 running a completely up to date version 
> of Fedora Cora 6.
> 
> About a week ago the clock started to lose time badly. It seems to be 
> running at about half speed (maybe a bit less).
> 
> I don't know much about this area so any advice would be much 
> appreciated. Is it possible that this could be caused by software? Or is 
> is a hardware fault?

An update on my situation.

The problem hasn't gone away. I've trying turning off ACPI and ntpd and 
it doesn't make any difference. I've also tried changing the set of ntp 
servers that I'm using The clock still runs at about half speed.

What works is to restart ntpd. As that happens, the clock is set to the 
right time. And then starts drifting again. But I thought that running 
ntpd meant that the time was constantly being checked and corrected.

This morning, I rebooted from a SUSE Live CD and that exhibited the same 
behaviour. So now I'm thinking that it's a hardware problem. Should I 
just buy a new battery? But the system is always turned on, and I 
thought that the battery was only used when the system was powered down.

Two other problems that might well be related.

1/ Watching videos in xine has become impossible. The sound is very 
stuttery. But it seems fine in mplayer.

2/ When converting .avi files to .mpg (as the first part of the process 
of burning SVCDs) the sounds gets out of step with the picture.

Neither of these symptoms occurred before the clock started running slow.

Still grateful for any advice.

Dave...
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