Clicking this menu item brings up a sub-menu something like this:


 

In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is responsible for maintaining the correct time in conjunction with other bureaus around the world. The Network Time Service provides the current time on several different servers. Due to the lag time inherent in the Internet, the time you get from this type of service will only be accurate to within a second or so, but for most of us, that's more than accurate enough.
 

Synchronize Now

Use this feature to set the time to the Internet time whenever you feel it's necessary. When the time has been set, you'll get a message box like this:

Note that it tells you the previous time and the new (current) time, so you can see how far off your clock was.

Under normal circumstances, this feature should return a result to you within a second or two. If it seems to take a long time before you get any response, it could be that the top server in your time server list is down. See the Edit Time Server List section below.

If you're not connected to the Internet, you will instantly get an error message box telling you so. If the clock doesn't return any result after a minute or two, it means there's some other kind of network problem, and it probably just gave up. Although there is no way to cancel the "Synchronize Now" feature once you invoke it, it will cancel itself if it takes too long.
 

Auto-Synchronize Every Day

When this item has been selected, a check will appear next to it on the menu.

This option tells the clock to silently synchronize itself approximately every 24 hours. We recommend you leave this item checked. It will keep your system clock accurate all the time without you having to do a thing or even think about it.

If you're not connected to the Internet, the clock will check again every hour or so until it sees that you are connected.
 

Edit Time Server List

When you select this item, a dialog box like the following will appear:

When the clock checks for the correct Internet time, it will go through each server in this list, until it finds one that it can connect to. It will usually wait about 10-15 seconds per server before giving up and trying the next one.

We provide you with a pretty extensive list of default servers, so there's no need for you to try to figure out which servers to link to.