It's About Time

If you're fastidious about your timepieces being in sync, this post is for you. If you're normal, it's not.

I love the concept of atomic clocks, atomic watches, and any other timekeeping device that keeps time accurate to the fraction of a second (such as my GPS receiver). At my workplace, we use a technique for keeping our servers and PCs in line with the official U.S. time, and I was delighted to find that I could do the same at home. I'm running Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; I'm not sure which Windows version started supporting this feature using the method described below.

• Double-click the clock in your system tray (or open Date and Time in your Control Panel).
• Click the "Internet Time" tab.
• Check the "Automatically synchronize with an Internet time server" checkbox.
• In the Server box, type time-a.nist.gov (time.nist.gov should work too, but as of tonight, it wasn't working; maybe one of NIST's servers is down).

Your computer will now synchronize with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency that keeps the official U.S. time.