Windows 7

To get started, click the “Start” button in the lower left corner of your desktop:

In the window that appears, in the “Search programs and files” field, enter the command “gpedit.msc”

“gpedit” will appear at the top, select it and left-click

The “Local Group Policy Editor” will open

Go to “Computer Configuration” then “Administrative Templates”

Next, go to “System”

In “System” select “Windows Time Service”

Next, go to “Time Providers”

Select “Enable Windows NTP Client” and double-click on it

And in the window that appears, switch the mode to “Enable”

And press “OK” or press “Enter” on the keyboard

Go to “Configure Windows NTP Client”

In the window that appears, switch to the “Enable” mode

Next, we set up

We change the items, in the “NtpServer” field we indicate the IP address of the NTP server or its DNS name, for example “pool1.ntp.od.ua”, or select any other server from our list, and a special server flag is indicated with a comma, in this case it is “0x9”

In the “Type” field, indicate that we will use the “NTP” protocol

In the “SpecialPollInterval” field, specify “900” seconds, this is the server polling interval

After completing the settings, press “OK” or press the “Enter” button on the keyboard

And the “Local Group Policy Editor” window is simply closed

Next, we need to start the time synchronization service

Press the “Start” button

In the “Search programs and files” field, enter the command “services.msc”

Choose “services”

A window titled “Services” will open.

We are looking for a list service called “Windows Time Service”

Right click on it and select “Properties”

In the window that opens, we see that the service is started “Manually”

Switch “Startup Type” to “Automatic”

Click the “Start” button

Save the changes by clicking the “OK” button

Close the “Services” window

Now we need to check if the service is running and what log entries it has made

Press the “Start” button

In the “Search programs and files” field, enter the command “eventvwr.msc”

Select “eventvwr.msc”

In the “Event Viewer” window that opens, open the “Windows Logs” section

Next, select the “System” log

Find the entry whose source is “Time-Service”

Double-click on the record with the left mouse button, a window with a detailed description of the event will open

In this case, the entry tells us that the service normally synchronizes time with an external server

Close the “Event Viewer”

Next, we need to check how accurate our clock is with respect to the external server

Press the “Start” button

In the “Search programs and files” field, enter the command “cmd”

Select “cmd”

Opened a command shell window “cmd.exe”

Entering a command “w32tm /stripchart /computer:pool1.ntp.od.ua /samples:3”

Where “w32tm” is the time service management tool, “stripchart” is to display a graph with statistics of clock deviations, “computer:pool1.ntp.od.ua” is the remote NTP server with which we are comparing local clocks and finally the argument “samples:3” means to build graph of only 3 compounds

Program execution example

This graph shows that at 13:30:49 the first of 3 test connections to the external NTP server was made, the result showed that the response delay from the server is +00.0000890 seconds, and the time difference is -00.0112226 seconds

The setup is complete, testing showed acceptable results and confirmed the functionality of the time synchronization service in Windows 7.