I have my Mac set to automatically grab its time from the time.apple.com server but its offten several minutes out of sync. Anyone else have this problem or do you set it yourself (as I'm doing now)? Sounds as though access to the time server may be being blocked but I don't see a way to check that. Ideas?

P.S. It's not my laptop internal battery - its only 6 mos old.

Mine is set the same way and I have no problems on the Mac side, however, it's a mess on the PC side the time is not even close. I don't use it much so I haven't bothered to find out why as yet soon maybe.

Mine is set the same way on both my MBP and my eMac and they always exactly match and show the correct time. Never had an issue with it since I started using it years back.

I noticed on my iBook G4 that even though it's configured to automatically sync, the time is often off. I'd like to see a solution as well.

Never had a problem with the time server. My clocks on my Power Mac and iBook have always been correct.

I've never noticed any difference between my powerbook and my imac. I use the nrc time server (time.nrc.ca or time.chu.nrc.ca). I can't remember why I use them instead of the apple servers - I think it may just be habit at this point.

Cheers.

For many years now, I've been using time.nrc.ca because I find it's the most reliable service by far.

I have also been using the Apple US time server, and have been noticing some fluctuations recently as well. I wouldn't have thought to check it, but now reading this thread has made me think. This morning I noticed that the computer's time was out by about 5 minutes compared to my watch, and now that I'm checking it now, its back to being only about a minute off, so maybe something is going funny with the time server. I'll try switching to time.nrc.ca.
Does anyone know how often the computer checks and re-syncs to the time server?

For those who seek more information - http://inms-ienm.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/time_services/network_time_protocol_e.php

How do you set the Mac's time and date panel to look for time from the NRC server rather than the Apple servers?

Open the Date and Time preferences pane, and enter the time server address in the field to the right of the text, "Set date & time automatically:"

Ahhh... presumably I need to log in as an administrator... silly me. Thanks.

Actually, silly me... You can click the lock icon in the bottom left corner to make the change without logging in an administrator account. I forgot to mention that.

You can also put a space delimited number of time servers in that preference pane. For example, my list includes time.apple.com time.nrc.ca and an internal corporate time server.
I noticed that both time.apple.com and time.nrc.ca DNS resolves to multiple IP addresses.

Oh and after you exit the preference pane notice that /etc/ntpd.conf is updated