I've got a 1998 Fujitsu laptop that is on 24/7, displaying a digital watch on an old 17" LCD monitor. It's so old it doesn't even have a fan, so it's completely silent(I've also replaced the hdd with a CF->IDE adapter with a 1GB CF card), and it runs Windows 95. I think it's a Pentium MMX 166Mhz + 64MB of ram. I guess nowadays a raspberry pi could do the same job with a slightly lower power consumption, but I've been using that laptop this way for years, so I feel bad about retiring it now.
It is actually! I've got an absolutely ancient PCMCIA wifi card that only supports 802.11b, but that's enough to connect to wifi and sync with NTP servers. Without it, the time drift is really bad, about 5-10 minutes/month.
I'm always amazed how bad time drift is with non NTP synced systems. I have a couple very inexpensive Timex Quartz analog watches that manage a month without any drift that I notice (they get reset when I need to reset the date wheel).
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I've got a 1998 Fujitsu laptop that is on 24/7, displaying a digital watch on an old 17" LCD monitor. It's so old it doesn't even have a fan, so it's completely silent(I've also replaced the hdd with a CF->IDE adapter with a 1GB CF card), and it runs Windows 95. I think it's a Pentium MMX 166Mhz + 64MB of ram. I guess nowadays a raspberry pi could do the same job with a slightly lower power consumption, but I've been using that laptop this way for years, so I feel bad about retiring it now.
Is it networked? Just wondering about the possibility of time-drift
It is actually! I've got an absolutely ancient PCMCIA wifi card that only supports 802.11b, but that's enough to connect to wifi and sync with NTP servers. Without it, the time drift is really bad, about 5-10 minutes/month.
I'm always amazed how bad time drift is with non NTP synced systems. I have a couple very inexpensive Timex Quartz analog watches that manage a month without any drift that I notice (they get reset when I need to reset the date wheel).