BIOS Clock Right, but Windows Clock Wrong? It's Not You!
ajdino
@ 2026-02-05 10:46:32
Hello everyone. I'm sorry for the extended silence. I'm hard at work on revising and optimizing our XP game archive.
I wanted to address an issue I discovered in the beginning of January 2026.
Across multiple retro machines - all of which had new CMOS batteries installed, I began to notice that the clocks were either wrong by hours and not minutes - or wrong altogether.
The kicker is that all my machines were reporting the correct time within their respective BIOS menus.
As strange as this all was, I wasn't the first to speak up about it to my friends and groups. When one of them told me they were experiencing this, I realized something has universally impacted our retro hardware community - and there wasn't going to be a fix - or even a tech news article on this. We are, after all, on machines that have been long ago left behind.
Again, I'm sorry for the delayed writing of this critical article, but I am here now and, if you haven't discovered this partial fix on your own, then I think you're going to really appreciate what information follows next.
While we can't rely on Windows Time Service anymore, there have long been third party alternatives that still work just fine (or at least, better than nothing at all!).
I recommend the use of NetTime. It's an open source program that works on all versions of Windows ever released and will even update the BIOS clock if it's wrong. Sometimes it has issues updating the clock on first boot, so I recommend going into its program settings and changing the update interval to do an update attempt every 15 minutes. This is just in case you forget to notice the wrong time yourself.
I don't expect to ever get a definitive answer as to why all of our clocks broke on New Years Day 2026. I also do not expect an official fix to be sent out in the form of a new and official Windows XP update (lol). If I'm wrong about either of these two points (and believe you me, I want to be wrong) I'll release a follow up article if there are any developments in this story.
Best wishes to you all and I'll see you in the next post.
I wanted to address an issue I discovered in the beginning of January 2026.
Across multiple retro machines - all of which had new CMOS batteries installed, I began to notice that the clocks were either wrong by hours and not minutes - or wrong altogether.
The kicker is that all my machines were reporting the correct time within their respective BIOS menus.
As strange as this all was, I wasn't the first to speak up about it to my friends and groups. When one of them told me they were experiencing this, I realized something has universally impacted our retro hardware community - and there wasn't going to be a fix - or even a tech news article on this. We are, after all, on machines that have been long ago left behind.
Again, I'm sorry for the delayed writing of this critical article, but I am here now and, if you haven't discovered this partial fix on your own, then I think you're going to really appreciate what information follows next.
While we can't rely on Windows Time Service anymore, there have long been third party alternatives that still work just fine (or at least, better than nothing at all!).
I recommend the use of NetTime. It's an open source program that works on all versions of Windows ever released and will even update the BIOS clock if it's wrong. Sometimes it has issues updating the clock on first boot, so I recommend going into its program settings and changing the update interval to do an update attempt every 15 minutes. This is just in case you forget to notice the wrong time yourself.
I don't expect to ever get a definitive answer as to why all of our clocks broke on New Years Day 2026. I also do not expect an official fix to be sent out in the form of a new and official Windows XP update (lol). If I'm wrong about either of these two points (and believe you me, I want to be wrong) I'll release a follow up article if there are any developments in this story.
Best wishes to you all and I'll see you in the next post.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!