In the midst of an interesting (and honestly titled) list of Random Vista Thoughts, Chris Lanier says:
Time synchronization still seems to not work. Hardly ever worked in Windows XP too.
For grins, I opened the Date and Time Control Panel, went to the Internet Time tab, and was greeted with this:
OK, first of all, that is a godawful error message. The peer’s stratum is less than the host’s stratum? Wha’? Whoever wrote that should have their keyboard taken away for a month. But this little experience reminded me of something that I’ve seen for so many years I’ve lost count:
The server at time.windows.com does not work reliably.
People have been complaining about this for ages but I can’t remember a time when this server was reliable.
It’s practically second nature for me to change the time server to one of the U.S. Government servers. There are several on the drop-down list that ships with Windows by default. You can also add your own just by filling in the address here and clicking Update Now:
That server (located in Boulder, Colorado) is physically close to my location here, and it seems to work reliably. You’ll probably have best luck finding a server close to your physical location. If you want more choices, check this link:
Update: Serdar suggests this link, which works worldwide:
Thanks for thinking of your non-USA readers.
(a comment from Tokyo)
Also consider the pool.ntp.org servers, which are geographically distributed. I’ve been using the .gov servers for a while now, but the ntp.org servers seem to work well too.
By the way, another confusing error message appeared when the “Windows Time” service is not started. Instead of displaying something like “The ‘Windows Time’ service is not started”, the following is shown instead: “An error occured getting the status of the last synchronization. The RPC server is unavailable.”
I tried this, but my Vista Date&Time Control panel has no such “Internet Time” tab!!! I cannot find any reference to it in either Windows Help or the MS Knowledge base. What gives?
I run Vista Business 32-bit.
By the way, your server just gave me the message “Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 3670016) (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/edbott/public_html/weblog/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 323
“
To answer my own question about the missing tab, I found this at windowsknowledgebase.com:
“If you are connected to a network domain, the timeserver will be managed by your company’s NPT server. The ‘internet time’ tab then becomes ‘invisible’. If you log out of the domain and log back in again using a local computer account, then the ‘internet time’ tab will become visible again. ”
It seems Vista is assuming too much; I don’t have any NPT server on my small home domain (AFAIK). Why won’t Vista let me choose my own time server?
Why doesn’t Microsoft fix the problem? I am very pissed that they haven’t elaborated this. Nonetheless I’ll be syncing with a different time server from now on.
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You can also set the time server from an elevated command line:
net time /setsntp:pool.ntp.org [to use my example]
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Date and time are correctly synchronized on my computer through time.windows.com. In fact, I’ve never had a problem with it here in Upstate NY.
As Corrine stated, no problems here (East Coast) with time.windows.com. Interestingly though, I did have problems with some of the gov servers when I changed over to them a few months back.
Thanks for the link to the NIST web site. That was a new one to me.
Hey thanks for this. This is the first one that actually worked properly for me.
Has anyone in the UK ever managed to get internet time synch to work with Vista ? If so, let me know !
I can’t get any of the servers to work. Keep getting RPC server unavailable.
Just an ordinary user here on the West coast. Entering other time synch web addresses doesn’t work for me. I just can’t synch ever with any website. I have the new Vista premium. I set the time manually, but it just gets a tiny bit off each day so I never have the accurate time. It’s really starting to bug me. I’ve tried fixes from other web pages, but they’ve all been unhelpful. Does anyone know how to tell me how to fix this in layman’s terms, not techie speak? I’m sure it’s my awful McAfee firewall, but I don’t even know how to turn that off without just completely uninstalling it.
Never mind, I figured it out. For anyone else pulling their hair out, open McAfee. Go to the Advanced menu if you aren’t already there. Click on the Configure box. On the left, click on Internet & Network. Now click the second grey row that says Firewall protection is enabled. Click Advanced… On the left, click System Services. Check the box next to Network Time Protocol Port 123. Click Apply, then OK. Then follow the synchronization steps as usual (only it’s best to enter another website than the junk ones they have listed).
Thanks for the road map for drilling down into McAfee to fix this problem! I NEVER would have found it by myself….
Top job, it has taken me two hours to find this Thanks!
Thanks Kelsey for the information! Works like a charm.