XP Home Edition -time autosynch modifying with regedit did not work

[Frank]

I followed the advice in a two-year old post about using regedit to
change time interval of XP's autosynch feature. (I didn't realize the
post was 2 years old. My mistake. The regedit change seemed to have
no effect. Can someone help?

Here is my response to original post:

Doug,

Thanks for your tip (5/02/2002) about using regedit to change interval
of XP's time synchronization feature. You may have saved me $30.

I made the edit, but I'm not sure its working. This was the first
time I ever used regedit. It looked fairly simple. Did I have to
"save" something to make changes take effect?

I changed the default interval (360,000) to 3,600. I made the edit
last night and did a manual time synchronization at ~8:16PM last
night. But the dialog box still lists the next change as being 1 week
away. And there was no auto update by 9:30PM.

I confirmed that the regedit entry was still there (3,600). Did I
have to reboot to get this to work?


I turned off the PC and went to bed.

This morning, I turned on the PC and the dialog box still listed the
next change as being days away. I did another manual synchronization
at ~5:08 AM and by 6:30 AM there was still no auto update.

What am I doing wrong?

By the way, the original regedit line listed the default interval as
360,000 (100 hours or 4.2 days) but the dialog box lists 1 week
(604,800 seconds) as the next schedule update. Why is this?


Thanks
Frank

I am using XP Home Edition on a laptop (no network)

PS - I just realized your tip was from 2 years ago! I didn't know XP
was that old, that may be the source of my regedit failure…

------------------------------------------------------------

original posting

Why use 3rd party software? XP has built in Internet Time
Synchronization.
And while the interval can't be adjusted through the GUI, it can be
adjusted.

Click Start, Run and enter REGEDIT Go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Config

Look in the right pane for a value called UpdateInterval This is a
Hexadecimal value that corresponds to a number of seconds.

E10 = 1 hour or 3600 seconds
15180 = 24 hours

You can use Calculator in Scientific view to do Decimal to Hex
conversions.

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

"Windows XP, as loaded, automatically updates the system time every 7 days
from one of two time servers. This interval can be changed as follows:

Using regedit, search for "specialpollinterval" without the quotes.

You will see that the "decimal" value is 604800, the number of seconds in 7
days.

Edit this "decimal" value to any value you desire, remembering that there
are
86400 seconds in one day and 3600 seconds in one hour.

Do this for each instance of the value "specialpollinterval".

Exit regedit. Choose the time server you want to sync to.

Reboot the system.

Cheers!!!"


--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Frank]

Hey Crusty, Thanks a bunch. Your suggestion worked fine!!!
Thanks again, Frank

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

You're welcome!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard