Clock weirdness

Hi, I've got Suse 8.0 on a HP 5270 notebook with KDE3. Everything seems to be running well but my system clock is going haywire. I found I couldn't set it using the K Control Center, so logged in as root and set the date with the right time. two days ago. Yesterday it had lost an hour - could have been me in my bleary-eyed 2 am state when I set the clock. But today it had lost 6 minutes. Anyone else have this kind of experience or have any advice? Thanks, Nick