You might notice one day that your windows clock falls behind, in most cases it will be a 2-3 minutes delay. This can happen due to a bad configuration or even a BIOS battery issue. For the BIOS battery, you should see the date/time problem before Windows loads or before the computer boots up with error messages related to date/time. For this, you will have to replace BIOS battery. Let’s say this is not the issue and you only have this problem in Windows, where the clock is set to either a local ntp server or to an Internet time server. In some cases, you won’t even be able to check the Internet tab from date/time settings due to restrictions/policies and so on.
It’s easier to check and fix this via command line.
First try inside a command prompt window:
Time /t
If you know that time was correct at a specific time and now it’s behind but on other computers that use the same ntp server the time displays correctly, you might have a problem with some of the services that run on your computer and influence how time works.
In my case, I tried to update the ntp config for the computer with the issue by using below command:
w32tm /config /update /manualpeerlist:time_server
This did output the following error:
The Windows Time service is starting.
The Windows Time service could not be started.
A system error has occurred.
System error 1792 has occurred.
An attempt was made to logon, but the network logon service was not started.
The culprit is probably something related to Window Time service. In my case, it didn’t want to start. I tried to go to start – run – services.msc and start it manually but the same error was displayed. I check the settings compared to a working computer, everything was fine but the service refused to start. I looked for dependencies and there was none. Dead end. Logs and events showing all the above, nothing new.
SOLUTION
At this step, I’m not really sure how I got here… I found a service called “netlogon” that might influence Windows Time service in a bad way. I checked this “netlogon” service and the only thing that looked different than on other computers was that its Startup Type was set to manual. I changed the Startup Type to “Automatic” and then I tried the above command again. I also remember starting the Windows Time service with right click but even if you don’t do that if you run the command: w32tm /config /update /manualpeerlist:time_server it should start automatically without any error.
In most cases, this will fix your problem and the clock should stay updated for a long time. I still don’t know what caused this malfunction of the services but at least we know a way out.
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