FAQ's and Troubleshooting

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Q. Why am I having poor time synchronization with W32Time?

 

A.
The Windows Time service, W32Time, has been known to provide extremely basic and sometimes insufficient synchronization performance in some installations of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003.

For several years, synchronization errors have been observed by Windows users. It seems W32Time can forget the location of the external time reference. A system registry value that stores the IP address of the NTP server such as a NetClock time server (or another reference PC) changes to a different ambiguous location. The result is loss of sync as seen in the Event Viewer as event ID 29, 38, 47, or 50, all indicating loss of synchronization.

See Microsoft’s knowledge base article 830092 to download the appropriate hotfix for your version of Windows.

An alternative is to use PresenTense NTP software. PresenTense is very easy to install and configure. Loss of synchronization generates email alerts instead of a passive entry in the Windows event viewer. Other applications are available in the PresenTense suite to improve reliability and manageability for a robust Windows network time solution. Download a free trial version of the PresenTense NTP software and see how easy it is to never worry about time on your Windows network again.

 

See our integration guide on configuring W32Time to synchronize to NTP time server.


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