[time-nuts] Setting Windows XP clock.

[Ed Palmer]

Now that I think back, I had a couple of XP systems where the system was 
configured to get time from the Internet, but the service silently 
failed.  You could click on the 'update now' button and would be 
informed that the update was successful but the time was still wrong.  
Stopping and starting the service fixed the problem for maybe a week and 
then it would fail again.  The only unique factor to these two systems 
was that they had AMD processors and therefore, the 'Cool'n'Quiet' 
driver to control CPU speed.  Since one of those systems was a media 
system running a PVR program, the time had to be correct so that 
recordings started and stopped on schedule.  I ended up running 
Dimension4 on those systems.

Ed

On 7/13/2014 10:42 AM, Chris Albertson wrote:
> I just checked.  I have an actually running XP system that runs in a
> VMWare virtual environment on my iMac.  Here is what I see
> 1) It is set to use an NTP server called  "time.windows.com" to set the clock.
> 2) It is using SNTP not NTP to set the clock
> 3) The above is working as well as it has ever worked.  Nothing has
> changed at Microsoft's end.
>
> It is easy to change the time server:
> 1) double click the clock in the system tray, this launches a dialog box
> 2) select "internet time" tab and see the pull down for selecting servers
> 3) I changed my XP system to use "0.north-america.pool.ntp.org"
> 3) click "update now" to test it.
> 4) click "apply" and close the dialog box
>
> The step "update now" will verify if the time is being set correctly.
>
> If you care a lot about milliseconds you can replace Microsoft's SNTP
> with the reference version of NTP.  But for most people "within a few
> seconds" is good enough.  SNTP allows the clock to drift between
> periodic updates.  My copy of XP updates the clock very infrequently
> so it drifts many seconds.
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 2:37 AM, Esa Heikkinen <tn1ajb at nic.fi> wrote:
>>
>> At first, Windows XP supports SNTP protocol (so it can be synchronized with NTP server, but not with "millisecond" grade accuracy) and it uses time.windows.com as default server. Maybe Microsoft is closed that server or something, if it doesn't work anymore. However it's easy to change the NTP server, like Ed Palmer alrady described.--
>
> I think all you need to do is double click on the clock icon
>
> Chris Albertson
> Redondo Beach, California
>