What would cause the system clock to run SUPER slow on a notebook, but not a desktop using the same distro?

The onboard clock in pc and notebokos are normaly complete crap.

This has nothing to do with the distro,
_but_ linux has several different methods to keep track of time.
Maybe your notebook uses the "wrong" way.

Read http://www.linux.com/howtos/Clock-2.shtml,
then you will know more. (it is only one page..)

Crap or not, the hardware clock keeps accurate enough time. The system clock, on the other hand, loses approximately 1 minute for every 4 minutes. I made a script which would run ntpdate to get the correct time from an ntp server, then adjtimex to adjust the tick and frequency to match the hardware clock, hwclock to sync the two clocks to the corrected system time, and finally adjtimex again to apply the corrected tick and frequency to the system clock. This worked great as long as the computer was on. This is a notebook, so it's not always on and not always connected to the internet, so I couldn't run it wherever I was.

It has SOMETHING to do with the distro because it only occurs with one specific distro and I've used several to test that theory. Every other distro was good. I posted this question at the distro's website and got similar response. The above mentioned script is based on a suggestion from that forum, but it provides only a temporary fix.

I don't know what the real problem is so I posted this in a general forum to see what other kind of responses I would get.

Mepis 2004.06 has the problem fixed. Everything's great now.

Disregard that last, the problem is still there. Back to Libranet...it's the best distro I've used.