Ah, daylight savings time.

The time of year that reminds us all that our computer’s automatic clock setting mechanism may not work as expected.

I’ve been getting the error message “”An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com” error message when trying to manually sync my clock to the Windows time server.

A screenshot of the error:

If you’re getting this error, here’s an easy way to fix it: change the value in the “server” field.

How to fix the time clock’s “An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with…” error.

  1. Open “Date an Time Properties” by double-clicking the clock (in the system tray area) and choosing the “Internet time” tab. (Alternatively, you can get to the same screen by going to Control Panel->Date and Time.)
  2. Change the value in the “Server” field to another valid time server. First try “time.nist.gov”. If that doesn’t work, try one of the following:
    ts1.aco.net
    nist1-la.WiTime.net
    ntp.alaska.edu
    utcnist2.colorado.edu
    tick.ucla.edu
    ben.cs.wisc.edu
    time.xmission.com
  3. If none of the servers listed above works, you may have a network problem. Either check your firewall, or keep trying servers from this list.

Hopefully one of the servers in this list will work for you!