Thursday, May 18, 2006
Adding Time Servers to Windows XP
Windows XP normally only has two time servers configured. Actually, on the fresh installation of XP Media Center Edition that came on my new Inspiron e1705 had a few additional ones as well, but nonetheless, I was curious to know if there was a way to permanently add additional time servers. While I was working on a completely unrelated project this morning, however, I found a registry key that would allow you to do just this. If you're looking for the DNS addresses of additional time servers, I recommend doing a Google search for time servers, or try here or here. Following below are the directions you'll need to add these DNS addresses to your computer to synchronize with:
- Open the Registry Editor by choosing Start --> Run ... --> type "regedit" in the prompt, and press OK
- Navigate your way through the registry tree to this location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DateTime\Servers
- Create a new REG_SZ (string value) by right-clicking in the right-hand pane, select New --> String Value and make sure to use a integer as its name. The way this works is that the lowest numbered value shows up at the top of the NTP time server list in the Windows Date/Time utility
- Open the reg key and type in the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the NTP server you'd like to use
- Open the Date/Time Windows utility by right-clicking the systray and click "Adjust Date/Time"
- Go to the Internet Time tab and select the new NTP server you added to the registry
