Quote:
Originally Posted by ProDigit
I've never owned or even seen a computer being off by more than 5 minutes in a year!
I think they are off when you overclock your device (change the clock and cpu modifiers).
But standard PC's are very reliable!
Even cheap $300 ones!
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It's temperature. If your local temperature is much different from that of the people who designed the chip housing the clock, you'll see major drift. I routinely see a drift of several seconds a day even on $100,000 mega-servers. Apparently spending $5 for a better clock is not worth it if it means they don't get to use the same hardware right across their cheapest to most expensive systems. It's not like the clock chip accuracy *matters* much: ntpd will keep the clock synchronized in any case.
(In the Kindle's case, it corrects every time you connect via wifi, but often fails to adjust for daylight saving time changes, and *also* loses the time every time you hard-reset it. This is downright ridiculous, really, given that the Olson timezone database which lets you accurately adjust to DST changes anywhere in the world is far older than the Kindle and *the Kindle has a copy of it*, in fact at one point it had two distinct copies. It just doesn't bother to consult either in the user-interface code.)