Windows Vista is a great operating system, but there are some problems that can occur. One of these problems is time synchronization. If you have Windows Vista and you experience problems with time synchronization, you should take action. The first thing you should do is check to see if your computer is synchronized with the time servers. To do this, open the Control Panel and click on the Time Synchronization tab. If your computer isn’t synchronized with the time servers, then it’s likely that something is wrong with your computer’s clock or its software. If your computer is synchronized with the time servers, then you need to fix some of the problems that are occurring. The first thing that you should do is change your clock’s date and time settings. To do this, open the Clock Properties dialog box and select the Date and Time tab. Then change the date and time to what you want them to be. For example, if you want to change your computer’s date and time to January 1st, 2009, then open the Clock Properties dialog box and select Date & Time in the Date & Time field and set it to January 1st 2009. If your computer isn’t synchronized with the time servers anymore or if it has stopped working properly because of a problem with its clock or software, then you need to reset it back to its original settings. To do this, open Settings in Windows Vista and click on Reset All Settings . Then click on Reset . In Reset All Settings , make sure that everything that was changed in Clock Properties dialog box was reverted back to their original values (for example, set date back to January 1st 2009). If all of these steps don’t work for you or if there are still some problems with time synchronization in Windows Vista, then you may need to get help from a professional technician or from a support group for Windows Vista users who are experiencing these problems.
The error you will typically get is “An error occurred while Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com. This operation returned because the timeout period expired.”
Changing the Time Server
You can change the default time server by right-clicking on the clock, and then choose Adjust Date/Time from the menu.
Click on the Internet Time tab.
Now click the Change settings button.
In the Internet Time Settings dialog, you can change the default server by choosing an item from the drop-down, or you can type in a new entry. You can also test it immediately by clicking the Update now button.
I’ve had the best luck with time-a.nist.gov, but that might be because of my location. Here’s a list of a couple of time servers that you can try instead:
You can find a longer list here: http://tf.nist.gov/service/time-servers.html
Change the Default Update Interval
If your clock is constantly out of sync even though it says the sync was successful, the problem could be that your computer is losing time because of a system clock problem. A workaround in this instance is to change the NTP client to update more often.
Open regedit.exe through the start menu search box, and then find this registry key:
Double-click on the key on the right-hand side for SpecialPollInterval
The default time period is 7 days calculated in seconds. If you wanted to change this to update every day, you would use 86400, or 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 1 day.
I wouldn’t recommend setting this to anything less than 4 hours worth, or your computer might get banned by the time servers.
Change Your Firewall Settings
I don’t have a screenshot for you here, but third party firewalls will often block the time servers, causing the sync to not work properly. If you are using McAfee or another firewall, you’ll need to use the configuration utility to unlock NPT access on UDP port 123.
