>>THIS JUST IN:
>>
>>Figured it out. A few weeks ago, I bought my son Age of Empires II. He and I play it together frequently. Sure 'nuff, I ran it twice today and each time, lost time equal to about 1/6 or 1/7 of game time. No other time loss was found to occur. Now, if I could figure out why AOE would do that....but, "not my yob" as they say.
>
>So, from what we've heard:
>
>1) Many machines have a time leak (and may be + or -)
>2) It probably has nothing directly to do with the battery in most cases, but rather,
>a) Certain apps disrupt the system time, or
>b) A chip's vibration frequency may be off slightly (or something like that)
>
>a) Results in "chunks" of time leakage.
>b) Results in a chronic consistent time leak.
>
>Now I see why my LAN resets local clocks at every login - I had no idea it was such a widespread problem.

Actually high frequency oscillators are very sensitive to environmental variations, especially temperature, that will cause them to "drift" over time. In engineering systems requiring very stable high frequency oscillators, a lot of R&D goes into developing compensating circuitry that will keep an oscillators frequency "on the mark". How close you want it "on the mark" will, of course, depend on various factors, like theoretical limitations, how much money you're willing to spend ( the big one :-) ), etc. I don't know what is done in cmos clock oscillators in this regard, but I would be surprised if they are "highly" temperature compensated.