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Subject: Re: LX200 internal clock problem
From: Brandon Jones
Reply To: mapug@shore.net
Date: Mon Aug 21 02:46:49 1995

I just wish that the manufacturers of computer equipment could/would make a clock that would keep time to within a few seconds per day. My pc loses more than a minute per day and so did its two predecessors. At least, the clocks in the LX200s that I have used have done much better than that! Tom

They (Pc's) all tend to use the same circuit made out of cmos nand gates using a 32768 khz crystal as the backup time source when the machine is switched off.To save money they put a fixed capacitor to tune the crystal to frequency and rely on manufacturing tolerances for the rest.You can improve this by buying a custom made quality crystal and replacing the fixed capacitor with a trimmer.The problem is that the machines time source changes when you run the machine or whether you are running windows or not.There are in existence precision time clock boards that exist and I beleive that some of the multi media systems help improve timing as well.In the shareware domain there is also a software based pc clock corrector that trys to compensate for machine time errors using user input information over a period of time to work out the necessary corrections after switch on.This is called 'Rightime' I have used it and it works but it plays havoc with any windows software using extensive time resources. Brandon S. Jones