WTF Microsoft? Win10 randomly forcing changes again

Are you dual booting with Linux? Linux expects the hardware clock to use UTC while windows uses local time. So every time you switch operating systems the clock is gonna be messed up until the OS synchronizes with a time server.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Time#UTC_in_Windows

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Yup, I am, and I get that. But…

It never syncs. I have left the computer booted into Windows for days, and it never syncs. I have also rebooted in Windows, only to boot right back into Windows and have the time be screwed up.

I’ve given up on Windows as a client operating system for anything i care about.

My work/serious stuff is on MacOS (a macbook - because PC laptops are in various ways - garbage, and linux just doesn’t work anywhere near as well on a portable) or iOS (which with my ipad pro i can do a surprisingly large amount of work - and with the pencil i’ve mostly eliminated paper from my life) or Linux.

Windows is only for gaming (or supporting an AD network at work), and when i upgrade my machine to a box that can do PCIe passthrough (next few months) THAT will be relegated to a VM.

I seriously believe Microsoft are seeing just how far they can push people, much like Facebook is, before they snap and finally give the product up. So far, people are proving to be very much suffering from stockholm syndrome.

Same here issue…I had this on two different installs and even when it was the only OS on a system.

The Win 10 clock almost always fails to synq with the time server, except for random cases once in a while that does. I think it is just a bug in synqing or a byproduct of software blocking telemetry.

As for the updates. Every update will reset settings and also PRO does not really give any option to stop downloading updates. Only gives you control of when to install them and at what time you restart the machine. So updates (alongside all the other crap that come with them) will always be downloading. Only the enteprize version with some registry hacks allows you to control the downloads fully.

About time sync in Windows, on my home systems I habitually change the default time server to a more local one. That had been giving more reliable results, as the default doesn’t always respond when queried.

@FurryJackman Why are people putting up with this again? Why do we not have games and Adobe products (the only two reasons I use Windows) on Linux yet? FFS, Micro$oft is making the Alex Jone’s of the world look credible.

@Eden That command gave me an error saying it’s not a recognized function.

@Grim_Reaper Spare the defensiveness; I just ignore people when they get self righteous and start assuming I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve gone 2+ years without any serious problems on my system the way I’ve set it up. A random crash due to software not being perfect here or there is the worst I’ve ever suffered. Now, whatever it was that Micro$oft did to start forcing changes on my system again, it’s screwing everything up. It started updating shit I wanted left alone, including 3rd party stuff that has nothing to do with Windows. It tried updating an NVIDEA graphics driver for a card that is no longer even installed anymore, without my permission of course. You can’t tell me the 3 freezes/crashes I’ve had recently and all the other stuff breaking isn’t due to Win10 forcing changes on stuff I had set the way it was for a reason. I have games that dont’ work as well under newer drivers. I have production software that I don’t want changed. This is infuriating.

Whatever changed seems to have created lasting problems. My goal, for now, is to just bite the bullet, update Windows, and use that thread that @Grim_Reaper posted to start regaining control of things after the update. MAYBE that will fix whatever broke. If I keep having settings changed and keep getting these crashes, I’ll just do a clean install. The only thing on my SSD is my OS and utilities, after all. That’s maybe 5 hours of work to get back to where I was.

As an experiment you could just keep Windows stock and see if you experience less breakage/changes then.

Eden said this somewhere else ( and here as well ) and I am basically numbing down what he said. But basically he said ( if I remember correctly ) is that Windows maybe looking at those programs and seeing that they are making changes and realizing that they themselves aren’t making the changes. And to make everything whole again Windows is reverting back to stock settings to “fix” itself, as it were. Because in Windows’ mind they were not the ones that made the changes in the first place.

I know that this goes against the thread, but I thought what Eden said made sense.

@Goalkeeper Nah, it makes perfect sense. It’s perfectly in line with Micro$oft’s business model. They want to control everything and treat the consumer like a drooling idiot and if you try to control anything that’s a problem. Windows freaking out because you tried to manually run things yourself is to be expected.

I don’t know man, something tells me maybe the third party software might be wigging out. Have you tried reinstalling it?

I have used Eastern time zones in Central and I have configured reporting servers to have the time zones of the clients in Pacific. The company I’m at currently supports 125,000 workstations and close to 30,000 servers… We don’t have time issues on Windows 10 or Server 2016 with Desktop Experience installed. We have some MS, some Linux, and some Cisco networking equipment managing the networks across the world, as well as some data centers, cloud hosting, and colo storage.

If Microsoft were bleeding the world dry with it’s control issues, I think my company and quite a few others would be seeing this. Sysadmin forums would be lighting up by the minute talking about this. I see a few, and generally it dies down, which leads me to believe it was a config issue or GPO that fixed it.

Try reinstalling the third party, or use that other thread for guidance.

If you want people to take you seriously, “Micro$oft” probably isn’t the way to go about it.

Yeah, I would update and then run Shutup10 to disable the telemetry and Winaero Tweaker to disable automatic reboots after updating. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but you really should update regularly.

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@anon79053375 I’m going to assume that whatever caused this hickup was some kind of change I made that seemed irrelevent to the OS (and thus why I don’t remember it) and it caused the OS to spazz out trying to find an update to fix something. I don’t see how else a system that’s been mostly stagnant for 2 years would start randomly having fits. Computers don’t do anything they’re not told to do.

Still, I am annoyed with how Windows handles these kinds of things. Making an OS constantly go behind my back to force changes I explicit try to stop is just infuriating and anti-consumer. I’ve gone ahead and did the updates for this so far. I’ve got everything back to normal… mostly. For some reason my File Explorer will just not open and this new build of Win10 is organized so differently I’m trying to figure out where everything was put. I believe it will work though. So long as it stops crashing and forcing changes on settings, I can deal with the privacy issues later. I just need it stable again so I can move forward.

I’m surprised no one has suggested sweeping for malware/viruses etc. just in case. If any of my machines start doing anything unexpected that’s one of my first thoughts.

On that note, I recommend installing and learning the basics of the SysInternals tools. We all know Microsoft will hoover up as much telementry as you are willing to share (or sometimes not) but that is not a reason for weird stuff, or an unstable system. Knowing how to use SysInternals can really help you peer under the covers and see what’s going on.

System clock oddities when Windows is the only OS is often down to a failed BIOS battery. Maybe worth a check?

I don’t know anything about SpyBot Anti-Beacon but I’m careful with that kind of software, I checked Shutup10 out on a VM before using it on my main system, but even then you can’t guarentee these things won’t cause a problem - same with other utils like CCleaner. Useful but there is always a risk that they can screw up a critical registry entry. System Restore points are worth using.

This goes without saying, although I am also surprised nobody threw it out there. No, viruses were the first thing I checked for when things started acting weird.

Idk if a BIOS battery would be relevant to this. The system clock changes are just repeat of what I dealt with when I first installed Win10 before taking over the settings. When Win10 first came out, I remember everyone talking about how the automatically set clock was always a few hours off. That does make me wonder, though… maybe there’s something else on the hardware level that caused some kind of issue that started this chain of events. I do run an overclock, though not a very big one like I used to. Perhaps something caused Windows to run a specific diagnostic that triggered an update check for a problem. I do remember having a system crash last week while playing Starcraft. I didn’t think anything of it; no software is perfectly coded and I occasionally get a disconnect or game crash. But… well, I’m grasping for straws there. I really have no idea what could have changed. As I’ve said before, I keep my system very stagnant as far as software goes.

As for stuff like SpyBot, I was very wary of using such things, but I did my research. Spybot was one of the best vetted ones that was being passed around over Win10’s privacy issues. I think even JayZ covered it.

I got 99 problems but Spy-Bot ain’t one.

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Sounds like your on an old or broken version of Windows. You ran it in power shell?

Can you go to settings > system > about and list the windows specifications listed?

In addition to the details @Eden is asking for pasting a copy of your update history might also be helpful. Useful to know if it was a ‘feature update’ you recieved first.

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Dual booting can make windows act weird with the system clock.

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This ^

This was one of my biggest annoyances when I dual booted openSUSE + WIndows 10

The clock wasn’t an annoyance when I dual booted Ubuntu and Windows 7.

Windows 7 isn’t Windows 10.