Time Synchronization - and Why One Geek Found It Important
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One of the screaming and cursing annoyance of my very first laptop was that it refused to keep accurate time. It was always late. And I do mean always. I had the battery changed. That didn’t help. I even had it sent back to the manufacturer. That didn’t help. What did help was a freeware program from Thinking Man Software:
“Simply put, Dimension 4 v5.0 is the fastest and easiest way to synchronize your PC’s clock for Windows-based operating systems. Once Dimension 4 is installed, you’ll most likely forget that it’s even running. It’s that automatic.”
link: Dimension 4 - from Thinking Man Software
This is a fabulous freeware program. It takes little of the resources and runs in the background. There is really nothing to do, as it runs by your preferences. I have the program on both my desktop and on my notebook computer. It loads on start-up and I don’t have to think about it.
You may think that the incorrect time is a small annoyance that you can handle. Well, so did one of my ‘geek’ friends, until he could not make his encryption work. The authentication for the encryption program was based on the correct current time. If there was a discrepancy in the time, the encryption codes would not work. It took him a good weekend, plus a few days, to find out what the problem was.
Chalk one up for the ‘rarely-late-and-most-likely-early’ side.
Catherine Forsythe
Director of Operations
FlyingHamster: http://flyinghamster.com/
[tags]time synchronization, freeware, time, encryption, catherine forsythe[/tags]
6 Comments
Joe
February 16th, 2007
at 7:22am
What’s the advantage of using this program when Windows already has a built-in “Automatically synchronize with an Internet Time Server” feature?
sjc1963
February 16th, 2007
at 8:52am
What’s wrong with Windows’ built in time sync?
Catherine
February 16th, 2007
at 10:29am
Good point… there is the time synch in XP. The problem was that, when XP first came out, that feature would not work properly for me. I kept receiving a server error, if I recall correctly.
I think that the time synchronization feature only started with XP. I don’t think that it is on earlier versions. I just checked Windows 2000 and I could not find it. Perhaps I am not looking in the right place. In Windows 2000, for example, it is possible to synchronize by using the command line. I believe the entry needed is: net time/setsntp:address (and the address is the domain of the time server). I just find using D4 to be easier… but I know that some people are reluctant to install additional software.
Catherine
David
February 16th, 2007
at 9:24pm
For many many years I have been a Tardis fan (along with the Dr. Who connotations), so time synchronisation is nothing new. Check out their shareware offering @ http://www.kaska.demon.co.uk/ Doctor Who fans will also appreciate the little utility called K9 to keep your LAN syncronised with the NTP time broadcasts provided by Tardis.
Peter
February 18th, 2007
at 4:11am
W2K has this feature as a service, Catherine, but is not activated by default, as is in XP. It was introduced in SP4.
Ted Williamson
August 20th, 2007
at 8:39pm
I recently found that the XP sync could not connect to time.nist. gov (NIST server A, I think) or time.windows.com. It kept giving me an error message.
I pasted in 129.6.15.29 (NIST server B, I think) and it works fine on this timeserver. The other two still do not work.
D4 disables the XP sync function but syncs the clock. It reports around a 0.050 to 0.077 second (50 to 77 millisecond for you geeks) offset whenever I have used it. I have not actually checked the clock drift for any substantial period of time.
Rebooting without D4 seems to restart the XP sync function.
If I reset the XP sync to daily instead of weekly that offset should drop quite a bit. That should remove the need for another program, no matter how small, from running on my system.
Of course tD4 can be set to sync in 10 minute or less intervals. That would guarantee negligible time errors.
For my purposes though, less than 0.1 second (100 milliseconds) accuracy is not a problem. I could probably get by with a minute or so.
Ted W.