Clock correction in GNU/Linux: should I crontab the “hwlock --hctosys”?

Question

My laptop's clock (Acer Extensa 5220) seems to be slow. I've corrected it 5 minutes forward last week and now have just corrected minute forward again.

How it's better to fix it? Is there a program [apart from time servers] to correct clock properly, for example, by shifting it a bit every hour?

Is there already a program to put it to crontab or I should hack up a script? Or I should check more things?

Update: I have found that HW clock is right, but system time is slow: about a second each 2.1 hours.

root@vi-notebook:~# dmesg | egrep 'clock|unstable'
[    0.103785] Switching to clocksource tsc
[    0.265274] Marking TSC unstable due to TSC halts in idle
[    0.265514] Switching to clocksource acpi_pm
[    1.321408] rtc_cmos 00:09: setting system clock to 2010-10-30 00:10:48 UTC (1288397448)

Is placing "hwlock --hctosys" to crontab a right thing?

Answer 1

This is the wrong solution. Investigate the clock, clocksource, notsc, and tsc kernel parameters.

Answer 2

You could install and setup the NTP time sync to resync the clock if/when you have an Internet connection. There's lots of guides on 'teh 'net', but I have picked this one

Answer 3

Try installing NTP, that should (if the drift isn't too high) keep your clock in sync. Once it's got your clock in sync it'll track the drift against what it should be and when you aren't Internet connected your clock will still be about right.