Laptop Clock Problems
 

My boss has a new (within the last 2 months) laptop that seems to have a problem with the clock that is displayed in the task bar (Windows XP). When the laptop is on or off, there is a great deal of time that is lost during the course of the day - It was set for the correct time of 10:30am yesterday morning and by 12:30pm actual time, the laptop displayed that it was 10:45am. I have noticed that when I have the Date & Time Properties screen open (in the background), the time does not falter.
I apologize for not having all the specs of the laptop, but was hoping that with the above information the issue can be addressed.

sounds like the clock is just wildly inaccurate to me. Download D4 (Dimension 4) and set it to update every 15 minutes. It'll sync your boss's laptop to a known accurate (i.e. nuclear) clock as long as he's connected to the net.

Check what time zone you have him in...

Is it gradual or does it jump? Definitely check the zone, and if it happens when not connected to a network.

Whether it's the real-time clock or something simple, I'd take care of it soon. Sounds severe enough to qualify for a warranty call. I've always found machines with bad clock chips to be a unique pain in the keister.

Wouldn't this be a battery problem? Not the laptop's battery but there is another battery on the motherboard that is usually used to keep the clock going.

Check the BIOS' clock settings while you're at it

A quick side-note. One of ther servers in our network was a little "late", so all our computers synced with this server every now and then during the day - No matter how often I corrected my "local" time, it was off again in a few minutes.

Had to bug the tech.support for a while before they fixed it.