Clock losing time

You may need to replace the real-time clock (RTC) when its integral lithium battery reaches the end of its life span. The battery powers the clock for up to 10 years in the absence of power. When the battery starts to weaken, it loses voltage, and the system settings stored in CMOS RAM (for example, the date and time) may be wrong.
Make sure you get the exact type, manufacturer and location of pin-1 of battery or else there is danger of explosion. Watch out when you replace it, other components might be hot(processor, fans, etc..) Hope this helps!

ensure the clock speeds for the processor are correct in the BIOS, otherwise is it losing time bit by bit or is it resetting the time and date??

The clock loses time bit by bit and only when the computer is powered up. When the computer is powered down the time remains accurate.

Since you have had the same problem with two motherboards (I'm guessing you have two similar units that you are swapping parts between?) my first thought would be that either the power supply in the computer is producing low voltage because it is aging, or because it is underrated. Have peripherals been added that would be loading down the power supply (or is a peripheral starting to fail and drawing a larger load than before?). Since the time is OK when the computer is off, I expect the RTC battery is still OK.

Three main reasons.
1.- The battery is out. All mothers have a battery, a lithium clock like, a rechargable one, but it must have a battery. Replace it or full charge it first!
2.- There's a bad clock setting under the bios setup. Watch also for any driver loaded in config.sys which is interferring with the clock.
A virus?
A resident program?
Remove all strange drivers form config.sys and strange programs from autoexec.bat, also do not use any app, and see what happens
3.- ASk your provider to check the accuracy of the clock. Many mothers may have some time divergence, say 1 minute per month, but no more than this.

If they have any problems memory management or memory usage this can be a problem, expecially since you say it is fine when the comtpuer is turned off. Some Programs will eat up system clock cycles and will not let the time be updated correctly. Sicne your using Windows 3.1 programs, I really don't know what to say to you, since there are windows 9x update patches, except get the last of the Windows 3.1 updates for y2k and if you can find out the BIOS MFG get any updates (if flash) that they may have and see what happens. Also remove smartdrive from the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Good luck.

Is this pc on a network? We had a pc that retreived time from a novell server- the servers time was off. Fixed the servers time and the problem disappeared.

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