My Get Things Done List » Blog Archive » Learn Something New: Synchronizing with Internet Time [GTD Wannabe]

Learn Something New: Synchronizing with Internet Time [GTD Wannabe]

Although I do all of my serious work on a laptop, it sits right beside a desktop that is really nothing more than a glorified radio and backup device. Every week, I synchronize my files between the two machines - this synchronization depends on date/time of files and if the two computer’s clock are off by more than minutes, I run into trouble.

Every now and then, I notice that the clocks aren’t synchronized, so I manually change one or the other to bring them in line. Today, I noticed that the difference was three minutes, even though I had just manually synched them a couple of days ago. What’s going on? Is my internal battery going? Surely, there must be some way to synchronize the clocks, say with the Internet.

Internet Time

Now, I’ve been using Windows XP for years now, and if I ever knew about the “Internet Time” tab in the Date and Time Properties window, I must have forgotten about it. A bit of googling brought me to that tab. What a smart idea, said I.

After looking at the two computers, I noticed that one was syncing (or trying to) with the windows.com server. The other was heading over to time.nist.gov. Now it makes perfect sense that the two computers were not in-sync between themselves; they were both looking to different servers.

Easy solution, I thought. Just set them to the same server. Unfortunately, of the two choices in that drop down list, I couldn’t get either of them to work on both machines. Yeesh. And, there didn’t seem to be any way of adding to that list. What’s the point of having a drop-down list, if you can’t add to it?

Adding a New Time Server

A bit more googling, and I discovered that it is very easy to add to the list; you just need to get your hands dirty in the registry. I found these instructions online (standard warnings about messing with the registry apply):

In the registry, navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / DateTime / Servers]
If you want to add a new time server, right-click in the right panel and select new string value. The name should be a number, e.g., 3 for the third item in the list, and the value will be the name of the server.
Some example time servers:
- “1″=”tick.usno.navy.mil”
- “2″=”time-a.nist.gov”
- “3″=”time-b.nist.gov”
- “4″=”128.105.37.11″
- “5″=”europe.pool.ntp.org”
- “6″=”clock.isc.org”
- “7″=”north-america.pool.ntp.org”
- “8″=”time.windows.com”
- “9″=”time.nist.gov”
You can get a list of US government time servers here (via).

My registry entries now look like this:

Personally, I’ve been a big fan of the US Naval Observatory clock for years, so it’s going to be my time server.

Now, all I have to do is make sure that I can access that time server on all of my machines, and their clocks will be in sync. Note: it doesn’t really matter what time server you use, just as long as all your machines point to the same one and can get the time without error.

Let’s just file this tip under “things I wish I’d known ages ago”