My computer clock is slowing down. It loses several minutes each day. How can I fix this, and what does it mean?

Time to get a new computer or a possible virus.

You need to replace the battery on your motherboard

I've never heard of any viruses causing that.

Okay. How do I replace the battery? Where can I get one?

The batteries on motherboards are special. They are circular and flat. They have a special voltage and what not. Um, I am thinking. I'm not sure exactly where to find one. Maybe do a search on google or try here www.newegg.com

If the battery is the problem, you may notice other things going wrong too, like your BIOS and CMOS being reset to default. The location of the battery on your motherboard should be obvious. Just remove it and put the new one in.

Thanks.

You need a battery, like others have said... Go to Walmart and look in the electronics section... find watch batteries, etc and look for a battery labeled CR 2032 that is all you need and it costs like $2.

I use a program called YACSmon, a freebie, which connects to the net everyday to check the time against an atomic clock and makes adjustments as necessary. As for slowing down, sounds lik, as has been said, battery.

Computer clocks do naturally slowdown this can be down to wear and tear in the sense that continued charge over a board eventually polarises(well negatises) a board slightly and even breakdown the very bonds of the circuitry molecularly.

Not to forget of course the battery losing charge over time.

The computers now available has utilised for sometime used a seperate "Clock co-processor", since using your overall processor would cause slowdown constantly everytime you increase the load it bears.

Originally I think the "clock co-processor" was also refered to "555" (Five-five-five) the number it was given, which is sometimes used in films etc to say that a pilot is running on time with an airlift.

There was a good explanation of the 555 use but it was taken down from it's original site but is still cached on google presently.
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:__sPHWph8vkJ:www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/555/555.html+555+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

There is always the potential for viruses to be engineered in assembly to utilise other portions of processors to "process" their threads (For instance the use of L1 and/or L2 caches of pentiums or the clock co-processor), however the majority of viruses written nowadays aren't nearly as technical and utilises preportion of language that the OS uses, rather than laugage that communicates with hardware.

There are alot of programs available on the net for time syncing the PC's time with an Atomic clock (The better programs work out your overall latency due to delay in transmittion etc and can make it accurate).

You should also note that the Atomic clock is more accurate than our actual planetary orbit, so ever so often the technicians of the clocks have to add a few seconds just to try and keep them aligned.

What a juggling balance our universe truly is.

another app like red devil mention ... http://www.worldtimeserver.com/atomic-clock/