Willard's Guide to Computing for Forgetful Power Users

Windows broke my time!

| 1 minute read

Updated 4 February, 2019

I've had this issue several times in the past: After installing Arch to a machine and rebooting a few times, the time may inexplicably be wrong. When you run timedatectl you might get something like this back:

        Local time: Mon 2018-12-24 10:21:41 EST # Something incorrect
        Universal time: Mon 2018-12-24 14:21:41 ETC # Is probably in EST or whatever your timezone is.
        RTC time: Mon 2018-12-24 19:21:41
        Time zone: America/New_York (EST, -0500)
        System clock synchronized: yes
        NTP service: inactive
        RTC in local TZ: no

The important things you will notice is that Universal Time won't be UTC and Local Time might be something weird. Anyway, the point is you fix it with this:

timedatectl set-ntp true

and then in Windows, you have to create a file named WindowsTimeFixUTC.reg with the following contents and then double click on it to merge the contents with the registry:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
     "RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001