My laptop is showing the time 1 hour slow.

I have checked the settings and it is set to automatically update for daylight saving, on the London time zone and set to update from the internet.

It shows it successfully synced this morning but still shows the wrong time.

Any ideas?

Search for “control panel”, then “clock” to bring up the traditional time setting options and try making the change from there. There’s a tab for internet time where you can force an update. Oh, and make sure the timezone is set to London, not GMT.

(If that doesn’t work, then try the Modern settings pane instead by right-clicking on the time in the taskbar and choosing “Adjust date/time”).

Tried both the app and the control panel settings. No joy.

Can you run the following commands in a powershell prompt and let me know what they say. It’s possible (but unlikely) that we’ll see something obviously wrong here that isn’t obvious in the Windows UI…

get-date

[System.TimeZone]::CurrentTimeZone

get-itemproperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\W32Time\Parameters NtpServer

Brexit

Microsoft’s internet services are out by an hour for 6 months of the year (between clocks changing in March and October), so my Outlook.com calendar appointments are out unless I manually change the clock on devices (Windows 10 desktops and Windows and Android phones). You have to set it to UTC then disable all automatic time/daylight saving updates and set the time manually.

Been like that for years and I missed my haircut once

NTP won’t work if the clock is too far out. Try manually setting it to a couple of minutes out and then force an update as above.

Cos we’ve gone back to 1976 or something #Brexit.

NTP won’t work if the clock is too far out. Try manually setting it to a couple of minutes out and then force an update as above.

Cougar wins the prize for best free IT support again. 😀

That did the trick.

Cheers.

Oh, they’ve moved away from time.windows.com, I didn’t know that. It’s about, er, time.

Try changing the server to a more local one – I’d recommend uk.pool.ntp.org

Ah, cool. (-:

Cougar wins the prize for best free IT support again.

What’s that they say – “Say nothing and have everyone think you’re a fool, or speak up and prove it”. Oh, OK then:

I don’t doubt Cougar’s skillz but that’s still shite isn’t it – You can make your machine automatically sort out the time changes but only if you manually adjust it most of the way first ? 😯

(my W10 just did it FWIW – I reckon you have a dodgy setting. Maybe it thinks it’s a phone & trying to sync with that sort of network or, err, something)

😳

I had an issue when I built my new pc a few months back, after manually correcting it a few times it seemed to sort itself out, and it remains a mystery as it’s fine now.

You can make your machine automatically sort out the time changes but only if you manually adjust it most of the way first ?

It’s nothing to do with your machine. that’s how NTP works. It’s whole raison d’etre isn’t to magically set clocks, it’s to correct inaccurate ones. An NTP client will monitor local time against a “known good” remote time source and quietly adjust it by a few nanoseconds here and there if it starts to drift. If it’s too far out to start with, NTP assumes it’s wrong rather than inaccurate and leaves it alone.

(For the benefit of the Windows haterz, it’s nothing to do with Windows either. NTP has been around since the mid-80s.)

Oh, and,

Any changes to things like daylight savings are handled by the OS. NTP has no concept of things like time zones, it’s a GMT time source (more correctly “UTC,” GMT is a time zone in itself). Windows knows the date BST starts and ends, and adds an hour to the UTC time in summer to give you the correct display time.

Phones work differently, they don’t use NTP. The date and time are encoded into (I think) the GSM signal. Similarly with DAB radios.

Windows and time zones is a bit of mash really. The correct time zone for the UK is “GMT Standard Time”. GMT is a time zone but was also used as a time standard. UTC (or Coordinated Universal Time) is a time standard and follows the same time as GMT. UTC ultimately replaces GMT as the “standard” used worldwide.