Last month I wrote a post ‘Make Windows Clock More Accurate‘ explaining how to make the windows clock more accurate by changing the server that Windows uses to synchronize time. As some readers pointed out, this didn’t completely fix the problem of Windows always running late.
The problem goes even deeper, and it appears that Window’s inbuilt task to synchronize time is, well, a bit stupid. This task will only check if the Windows Time Service is running, and will only update the time once a week even if you change the schedule. To stop the couple of minutes a week drift in Windows, we have to create our own task to get the windows time to update once a day
Create Scheduled Task
- Go to the start menu and type in ‘Task Scheduler’ and click on the link
- Click on ‘Create Task’ in window that opens up.
- Give the task a name like daily time update
- In General, click on ‘Change User or Group…’ and enter ‘Local Service’. Also tick ‘Run with highest privileges’ and choose the configuration operation for your Operating System
- Go to the ‘Triggers’ tab and click new. Choose ‘Daily’ and choose a time for the task to run
- Go to the ‘Actions’ tab and add these actions in this order :
(i) choose ‘Start a program’ enter ’%windir%\system32\sc.exe’ with the arguments ‘start w32time task_started’
(ii) choose ‘Start a program’ enter ’%windir%\system32\w32tm.exe’ with the arguments ‘/resync’
- Now go to ‘Settings’ and tick ‘run as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed’
That’s it. If you want to doublecheck everything is ok, you can manually run the task by rightclicking on the task and selecting ‘Run’.
On my server I found that my time was drifting off at a rate of about 23 seconds every 5 days, so while not considerable it’s definitely noticeable. This script is very useful and very easy to implement.
49.8% are STILL using XP, get used to it!
thanks for this tip unya