treyharrell.com

Resynch time on WinXP (including x64) at reboot

September 26th, 2008

I love being able to triple boot Linux, MacOS X and WinXP x64 on my main Mac for 3D & web development work, however Windows handles time zone offsets differently from every other OS out there — so when you reboot into Windows, you’re looking at a 4-5 hour difference (EDT currently).

Apple’s Boot Camp drivers handle resynching the time automatically, but they don’t work with WinXP 64 (only Vista x64), so I’ve hacked together a quick .bat script that’s intended to be placed in your Startup Items folder (under the start menu).

It includes two longish pauses: the first because sometimes the startup items get invoked before the network card initializes (silly Windows). The second is so that you can read the result if the script fails before the shell window auto closes.

At any rate, just paste the following into Notepad and save as timesynch.bat in your Start Menu startup items (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Programs\Startup\)

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Preparing to resynch time to Internet time server ...
TIMEOUT 10
w32tm /resync
ECHO Execution complete ...
TIMEOUT 5

Entry Filed under: CG, Geek, Tutorial