Windows Time and Task Scheduler services

[petteyg359]

My systems have both Windows and Linux installed. On both systems, I have set the registry entry to make Windows treat the hardware clock as UTC. This works just fine on my machine at home. On my laptop, though, Windows is constantly resetting the clock in the task tray to show UTC time, despite the local time zone set to CST. Also, the Windows Time service is constantly crashing. When I modified the pre-installed weekly sync scheduled task (that starts the time service for it to sync) to run every hour instead of weekly, now the Task Scheduler window shows an error "The selected task {0} doesn't exist. Press refresh to see current tasks." and the task status section shows "Reading Data failed" no matter how many times I click refresh. Anybody have any idea what is going on?

 

[txus.palacios]

I've seen this happen before. It seems that Windows has some bugs when the RealTimeIsUniversal string is set to 1.

IMHO, the best solution is to set Linux to local time if you're having weird bugs.

EDIT: You could as well disable Windows NTP services and install ntpd on your Linux system.

 

[petteyg359]

I've seen this happen before. It seems that Windows has some bugs when the RealTimeIsUniversal string is set to 1.

IMHO, the best solution is to set Linux to local time if you're having weird bugs.

EDIT: You could as well disable Windows NTP services and install ntpd on your Linux system.

Hardware clocks belong in UTC. It is hilarious and depressing that Windows, after so many years, still does not fully support a system clock offset from the hardware clock.

I always use ntpd on Linux, hence the UTC hardware clock.

If I ever happen to be offline and can't see a clock from where I'm sitting, but know the timezone, it'd be nice to always know the hardware clock is in UTC. If it's not, and you're not sure what timezone it was set to (see the earlier link), there's no way to guarantee what time it is without finding a properly set clock somewhere else.

Just for random information, it only seems to break the clock when time functions are in heavy use (Bethesda game scripts with lots and lots and lots of timer calls). Fallout NV and Skyrim both crash occasionally, and whenever they do, I immediately see that the time shown on the system tray clock has lost the local timezone. Other games that don't rely on lots of timer functions don't have this problem.

 

[habbajabba]

I use Dimension 4 in windows as well as disable the time sync service. It's totally portable.
http://www.thinkman.com/
As far as tasks scheduling is concerned, Windows7 Mgr has it down, but I don't game so can't comment on clock speeds, as you can tell-lol.

 

[petteyg359]

Managed to get it to stick, finally. Created my own task (instead of modifying the built-in time sync one which seems to have totally disappeared now after I edited it the first time), which runs a powershell script that starts the time service and runs the sync every five minutes. Why they can't just get with the times and use UTC like everybody else...