Freelance web and mobile developer
In: Vista
15 Jan 2007So there you are, working on a nice little project. Plenty of time before your eleven o’clock appointment is coming, expecting a nice demontration of the current status.
“Hello” – someone says. What? Hey – guess what – it’s the customer!
“You’re early!” – I said.
“I am?, I thought we said eleven o’clock” – he replies.

But I’m not finished and the clock in my right hand corner saids “10:24″. Aaargh. What’s going on? So I click on the damn clock and guess what, the time is REALLY “11:00″. Great!
Now, this has actually happend once for me and once for my coworker. Nothing major of course, but it is really annoying that you can’t trust the Windows Vista clock anymore. Either you have to click on the time in the right hard corner to make sure that it is really, really, the correct time – or maybe invest in a wrist-watch…
I'm a freelance web and mobile developer that likes to share whatever experiences I might encounter. It used to be .NET related, and still is to large extent, but I'm also a struggling agnostic trying out interesting technologies from the big three - Microsoft, Google, Apple - and the open source world.
5 Responses to Windows Vista bug – clock is not updating
Zerpico
February 18th, 2008 at 09:02
Try changing the time server it uses. Some are overloaded.
http://tf.nist.gov/service/time-servers.html
Konstantin
March 6th, 2008 at 12:00
This actually have happened several times to me and my cowerkers too. I was lucky to miss only lunch, not an important meeting
Scott
March 21st, 2008 at 00:22
This still happens on Vista SP1. Great, I thought it would have been fixed.
Btw this has nothing to do with an overloaded time server (Windows doesn’t freeze the time until it hears from a time server, that would be silly). It’s a bug in the shell. Can’t believe it’s not fixed even in SP1.
My workaround is to right-click, properties, hide the clock, apply, show the clock, ok. I’ve missed more than a few buses because of this bug.
flemo
April 1st, 2008 at 14:14
Zerpico: I don’t think time server can help. It’s not a problem, that Vista has wrong time, time is just wrong displayd, it’s not updated.
If you click to a clock on taskbar, complete clock with calendar appears showing correct time, but in taskbar stays wrong time.
I had to hide taskbar and next time it has shown correct time.
http://fleming.misto.cz/_MAIL_/VistaTime.jpg
Ondrej Spanel
March 11th, 2009 at 15:09
It just happened to me now. Very strange and very nasty. I supposed I have still a plenty of time ahead, while the time was actually over.