Windows 7 clock is constantly being reset back 5, 6 or 7 minutes

My computer is about 4 years old, so when the clock started to not keep accurate time, I assumed it was the battery on the motherboard and promptly went out and bought a new one. That didn't solve the problem. So I started looking a little more closely at the problem. Here's what was happening.

I would adjust the clock through Windows and synchronize it with the network time server. The clock would have the correct time compared to my watch and cell phone. Then I would wait for a few minutes and usually within about 5 minutes, the clock would reset backwards by 5 minutes. It was consistent in jumping backwards the same amount of time.

To make a long story short, the problem turned out to be the software from an on-line backup service reseting the system clock.

Here is how to identify the application that is resetting the time on your Windows 7 Computer.

  1. Click the Start button | Control Panel.
  2. Click System and Security.
  3. Click Administrative Tools.
  4. Click Event Viewer.
  5. Click Windows Logs | System.
  6. Look through the list of events for an event that happened at the time the clock was reset. It should be a Kernel-General source. It's easiest to find this event if you do this immediately after the clock has reset itself.
  7. If you select this item from the list, it will show something like: The system time has changed to ?2014?-?03?-?06T13:11:39.985000000Z from ?2014?-?03?-?06T13:11:39.985000000Z.
  8. Click the Details tab in the lower part of the screen.
  9. Click the + symbol beside System.
  10. Look down through the details until you come to Execution. If it has a + sign, click that to expand the Execution details.
  11. Make note of the ProcessID.
  12. Launch the Task Manager on your system by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete and clicking Start Task Manager at the bottom of the list.
  13. Click the Processes Tab.
  14. Click View | Select columns ...
  15. Enable PID and click OK.
  16. Click on the PID column header to sort the list in order of the process IDs.
  17. Now you can locate the application name associated with the process ID that set the time back.
  18. Right click on the file associated with the process ID and click Open File Location.
  19. You know know which file is setting the clock. Hopefully the folder name clearly identifies which software application is responsible.

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