Windows 8 Media Center and my Clock

Something strange happened on my Windows 8 Media Center computer.  I didn’t really realize it because the computer’s clock is “always right”, right?  But I slowly started missing more and more of the beginning of my recorded TV shows.  Then, after several months, I realized that the clock on my computer was drifting.

That seemed weird. After all, it’s supposed to synchronize itself to the Internet Time service, but for some reason that wasn’t happening.  After poking around a bit, I discovered that, in Scheduled Tasks (Search for Schedule Tasks in settings, or Windows + R, and type “mmc.exe taskschd.msc”), the time synchronization task was running in the wrong user account.

To fix it, I changed the tasks in Microsoft->Windows->Time Synchronization to use the LOCAL SERVICE account.  (Right click the task and pick properties).  No guarantees, and I’m not responsible if you break anything, but if your Media Center computer doesn’t seem to be able to keep accurate time, you might want to check and see.  As I mentioned before, I'm not in the Media Center team, and I'm not quite sure why it's configured this way.

-Shawn