How do I give my rtc Ritalin?

Starting earlier this past week my system suddenly sped up. Normally this would be good, but the problem is that it sped up in a way that is breaking things. Namely the clock things that a second is approx 60% faster than it really is, and as a result I get timeout messages for things that I shouldn't.... it also makes MP3s/OGGs play in Fast FWD.

I'm using an ASUS P5A Socket 7 board with an AMD K6-2 450MHz not over or underclocked. I really haven't the slightest idea what's causing this. Is this the sort of thing that happens if the CMOS batteries die?

At the very least, is there a way to setup ntpdate/ntpd to set the clock about every 5min so that I can tell approximately correct time?

I'd think it were a weird quick of some software packages or even my kernel..except this is happening in Windows too.

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Originally Posted by dravenlosft

except this is happening in Windows too

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What about that CMOS battery then ?

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Originally Posted by antidrugue

What about that CMOS battery then ?

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That, actually, was one of my questions. The only experience I have with bad CMOS batteries were old laptops that used the laptop battery to maintain the CMOS... the batteries didn't hold charges so the clock would go all kinds of wrong if the A/C plug were pulled. ... or if they were turned off for a few days.

I suppose I could change them out. Just, before I went battery hunting, I wanted to make sure this didn't mean my motherboard or CPU were about to shuffle off the mortal coil.

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Originally Posted by dravenloft

Just, before I went battery hunting, I wanted to make sure this didn't mean my motherboard or CPU were about to shuffle off the mortal coil.

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CMOS battery are very easy to find. Computer stores throw them away by dozens every day (they don't bother pulling them out from those broken motherboards). Perhaps the problem is not with your battery, but that's perhaps the easiest thing to try.

Oh, this is neat. The CMOS battery wasn't dead. Admittedly after this many years it's not full charge, and far from it. So I've gone ahead and replaced it with a fresh battery.

Now the BIOS clock is right, and WinXP with it. Strangely enough though Linux's clock is wrong still by +75%. After some experimenting though, I've figured out that the problem is related to the fact that, while I use Debian's Etch branch for all my software, I'd gotten curious and installed my kernel off of Sid. Seems while running that 2.6.18 kernel from Sid it speeds up my clock.

Now strangely, my Init structure got scrambled somewhere so I get a lot of Seg faults booting any backup kernels I have installed. I'm too lazy to fix that, and my harddrive could do with a little spring cleaning so I'm going to reinstall.

Thanks for the help in figuring out what went wrong, everyone.