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.
- Click the Start button | Control Panel.
- Click System and Security.
- Click Administrative Tools.
- Click Event Viewer.
- Click Windows Logs | System.
- 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.
- 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.
- Click the Details tab in the lower part of the screen.
- Click the + symbol beside System.
- Look down through the details until you come to Execution. If it has a + sign, click that to expand the Execution details.
- Make note of the ProcessID.
- Launch the Task Manager on your system by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete and clicking Start Task Manager at the bottom of the list.
- Click the Processes Tab.
- Click View | Select columns ...
- Enable PID and click OK.
- Click on the PID column header to sort the list in order of the process IDs.
- Now you can locate the application name associated with the process ID that set the time back.
- Right click on the file associated with the process ID and click Open File Location.
- You know know which file is setting the clock. Hopefully the folder name clearly identifies which software application is responsible.