Adventures in Engineering

The wanderings of a modern ronin.



Ever wondered if you can synchronize your Windows (2000 or later) computer's clock with an NTP server? Yes, you can download NTP synchronizer program if you want. But I am lazy and hate waiting for downloads, so I wanted to do this with just stuff that ships with Win7.



Turns out you can synchronize with time.windows.com, which is accurate to approximately 1.5 seconds. If that's good enough for you, here's a way to do it without downloading anything:



First, click on the Start menu at lower-left. Type in "cmd". Windows will show you a "cmd.exe" program. Right-click on it and then click "Run as administrator". Now a special "administrator" command prompt will come up. Type in:



net start w32time



w32tm /config /update /manualpeerlist:time.windows.com



w32tm /resync



net stop w32time



The "net start" command starts a windows service that synchronizes clocks, the "w32tm /config" commands tells it you want to synchronize with time.microsoft.com, the "w32tm /resync" command says "okay, actually do a sync now", and finally the "net stop" command shuts down the sync service, since the clock has successfully been sync'd.



It's a lot more convoluted and annoying than Linux's "ntpdate", but I guess that's Windows for you. :P If you anticipate doing this frequently, by all means cut and paste the above into a batch file named "synctime.bat" or whatever. Just remember that you need to run it as administrator, or it won't work.





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