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Synchronisation of Windows PC through Internet

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In order to synchronise my Windows PC with Universal Time (UT) through Internet, I use the Meinberg freeware based on the NTP time protocol.

When I first started to use it, I rapidly noticed regular jumps with amplitudes of about 100 to 150 msec resulting in a bad time synchronisation.

Thanks to help from the Meinberg company, I rapidly understood that the problem was a known deficiency of Windows. It is very easy to solve it, by adding the instruction /usepmtimer to the boot.ini file. This forces Windows to use the timer of the power management system for its time-related APIs. The trick is extensively explained at the following links:
- Support Microsoft
- Google group about NTP

The time synchronisation is now excellent. I have good reasons to think that time synchronisation with other softwares (e.g. Dimension 4) may suffer from similar problems. My computer is a standard Dell PC with Pentium 4 processor.