Synchronizing your PC's clock daily

Comment #2

Todd — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:36:36 GMT

This is why every copy of Windows has a time synchronization feature in the first place. If you feel that having your clock go 1+ minute out-of-sync for every 1-2 weeks that passes is OK, then don't bother doing this. However, I prefer for my computer to keep accurate time.

Comment #1

truecritic — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:11:25 GMT

My clocks haven't been affected. Accurate enough that I don't fool with synchronizing too often. Maybe once a month manually, because I'm paranoid. Didn't really have a problem on my Dell with Win98 either. I used a program to sychronize that as there was no built-in one for Windows. Going back to my 286, that one was bad.

Original Blog Entry: Synchronizing your PC's clock daily

Todd — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:48:25 GMT

One of the poorest parts of a PC is its ability to keep accurate time. I could never figure out why, but a PC's clock is worse at keeping time than a gumball machine plastic watch.

Windows does have a feature that tries to synchronize the clock with a server on the Internet, but it does not synchronize often enough, in my view. And if it fails when it attempts to synchronize, your PC's clock can get way out of wack.

For some reason, Windows makes it impossible to control how often the clock gets synchronized. Probably to avoid a massive traffic problem on the time server.

But today I found a nifty little program that lets you change the synchronizing to occur either daily or hourly.

I think hourly may be a bit overkill, but daily is definitely a good idea.

Here's a link to the utility: http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_inet_time.htm

It comes in a simple zip file, and there is no installation necessary. The zip file contains one file. Just copy that file to wherever on your hard disk you'd like to keep it, and then run the program.

It displays a little dialog box asking how often you'd like to synchronize the clock. You click the option, click Apply, and the click Exit. That's all there is to it!

Works with Windows XP and Vista. I haven't tested Windows 7 yet, but it probably works there too.

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