Clock drift & other weirdness with an Inspirion 8100

[Ian Eure <ieure@debian.org>]

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I have a relatively new Dell Inspiron 8100 which is exhibiting some strange 
symptoms. Firstly, there is massive clock drift. The system clock seems to 
run too slow, losing several hours a day.

Secondly, I can't seem to play any video on it. Both mplayer and xine lose 3-5 
frames every 45 seconds or so. Xine shows this semi-helpful output:

-- snip --
200 frames delivered, 0 frames skipped, 0 frames discarded
audio_out: adjusting master clock 1093958 -> 1105016
video_out : throwing away image with pts 1096023 because it's too old (diff : 
95
16 > 1501).
video_out : throwing away image with pts 1099026 because it's too old (diff : 
65
13 > 1501).
video_out : throwing away image with pts 1102029 because it's too old (diff : 
35
10 > 1501).
200 frames delivered, 0 frames skipped, 3 frames discarded
-- snip --

The line about 'adjusting master clock' would seem to indicate that there is 
some disparity with the timing that is causing frames to be dropped. This is 
not a problem with the player, since both mplayer and xine play the same 
files on a slower system just fine.

I've disabled power management & SpeedStep in the BIOS, to no avail. Does 
anyone have a clue what's wrong here?

Please CC on replies, since I'm not subscribed, and I can't seem to locate a 
place to put a Mail-Followup-To header in KMail.

-- 
"das ist liebe, das ist hass / mit eifersucht vermahlen"

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