How to create a time counter without using Sleep()?

Question

I want to create a time counter that would count from 120 minutes and down. I thought about using Sleep() but I have found out that Sleep() is not accurate (so maybe the countdown would take 122 minutes instead of 120 minutes!). What other alternatives do
I have?
Note that I want to count 1 second at a time, because I want to show the countdown progress to the user in seconds.

Answer 1

The next experiment still uses Sleep and waits for approximately 12 seconds, displaying the time each second. However it is probably too overcomplicated compared to time polling:
const
int SECONDS_TO_WAIT =
12;
ULARGE_INTEGER ul_end;
FILETIME ft;
GetSystemTimeAsFileTime( &ft );
ul_end.LowPart = ft.dwLowDateTime;
ul_end.HighPart = ft.dwHighDateTime;
ul_end.QuadPart += 10LL *
1000 *
1000 * SECONDS_TO_WAIT;
for( ;; )
FILETIME ft;
GetSystemTimeAsFileTime( &ft );
ULARGE_INTEGER ul;
ul.LowPart = ft.dwLowDateTime;
ul.HighPart = ft.dwHighDateTime;
if( ul.QuadPart >= ul_end.QuadPart )
break;
SYSTEMTIME st;
FileTimeToSystemTime( &ft, &st );
Sleep( 1000 - st.wMilliseconds );
GetSystemTime( &st );
if( st.wMilliseconds >
500 )
FILETIME ft;
SystemTimeToFileTime( &st, &ft );
ULARGE_INTEGER ul;
ul.LowPart = ft.dwLowDateTime;
ul.HighPart = ft.dwHighDateTime;
ul.QuadPart += 10LL *
1000 *
1000;
ft.dwLowDateTime = ul.LowPart;
ft.dwHighDateTime = ul.HighPart;
FileTimeToSystemTime( &ft, &st );
// show the time
SystemTimeToTzSpecificLocalTime( NULL, &st, &st );
printf( "%02i:%02i:%02i\n", st.wHour, st.wMinute, st.wSecond