Clock skew possibly caused by suspend/resume

Question

In an attempt to save electricity, my girlfriend has started suspending her desktop.  She started complaining that the clock was off, in spite of the fact that I have ntp running.  I think that what is happening is that when she suspends it, the time is saved and when she turns it back on, the time is set to what it was when she suspended it.  Another possibility is that the hardware clock takes over, and the internal battery is getting weak.  I would have to do some testing, and ban her from the pc for a while to figure out exactly what it is.
Anyway, ntp doesn't work properly if the time is too far off, and gives up.  Has anyone else had this problem? 
PS  The I haven't updated her software in a long time because unfortunately she has an onboard intel gpu, and the newer drivers aren't working so well.  Maybe this is a situation that has been resolved already.
PPS I know that I could set a chron job to run ntpdate occasionally, but I think that this is unfriendly to the servers, and of course, she would have to wait for the chron job to fix the clock.

Answer 1

This is funny! Something like that happened to me as well... I was suspending my laptop frequently and for a long period of time, and my clock started to be off.
I was constantly setting it manually using the 'date' command, and then at some point it was normal again. I have no clue why it started working again. It just did.... I am not using suspend anymore, though.