Time drift?

[Jason Dunn]

Has anyone with MCE 2005 noticed that their computer tends to have trouble keeping accurate time? For several weeks the automatic time updated wasn't working for me - it kept giving errors - and now even though it is working, my system got 2 minutes out of sync in less than 24 hours. It's very strange, and very irritating. I can probably use a third party time-sync tool, but I'd prefer not to.

[dr_doak]

Last night I noticed that my newly built WMC05 system was indeed off by two minutes. I reset it and will check again tonight.

Also no luck with auto time sync (tried two different sites).

[dr_doak]

OK, found a good solution:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services \W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient

Change the "SpecialPollInterval" value to a number you want. Might want to make sure that it's actually in decimal and not hex when you enter the new value (in seconds). That caught me a few times... Then reboot!

I set mine to sync every 4 hours.

There are Group Policy options you can get to in gpedit.msc under "Computer Config -> Admin Templates -> System -> Windows Time Service." It looked like one of them might adjust for inaccuracies in the system clock, but it seems like the things I changed either broke something or did nothing...

Also, I found that for Media Center, the .NET service seems to be what breaks the time services. Either update it or reinstall it and then it seems to work.

[Jason Dunn]

Fascinating - thanks for the tip, I'll try the reg hack!