Lansing on 22/5/2008 at 22:15

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The clock is most likely on your motherboard - either as a dedicated real time clock chip or as part of another device. However, it used to be the case that the time would only be read from that chip when your computer was switched on or restarted. After that, the operating system maintained the time which was a lot less accurate and could lose seconds (or more) per day.

Using the internet time synchronisation as others have suggested works nicely for computers or servers that need to be on for a long time, but the default windows time servers in XP have had frequent problems and often refuse to synchronise properly. The national institute of standards and technology time servers are a lot better - I've used time-b.nist.gov server with good success in the past. Simply replace the time.windows.com default server and you should be ok.