by Brian Grainger brian@grainger1.freeserve.co.uk

When the very first PCs came out you had to enter the date and time every time the PC was booted. This was slightly irritating and it was not long before we had battery backed CMOS for the BIOS, which allowed the date and time to be retained even when the PC was turned off.

The advent of Windows, up to version 3.11 at least, did not alter this state of affairs. It added its own GUI control for setting the time so one did not have to descend to DOS but it was essentially the same. However, it was necessary to use this function at least twice a year, when British Summer Time started and ended.

With Windows 95 came a new function. Windows 95 would automatically adjust the clock when summer time started and ended. It does not work when there are 5 Sundays in March or October, because it changes the time automatically on the 4th Sunday, but it is better than nothing. Unfortunately there were 5 Sundays in October 1995 so everyone had great fun with the clock 'bug' in the recently released Windows 95. There will be 5 Sundays in October 1999 so I suppose we can expect the same cries of outrage against Microsoft. You could resolve this problem by adjusting the registry when you know there are 5 Sundays in the month but you will only have to readjust it afterwards so it copes with the regular 4 Sundays. It is simpler to adjust the time manually on these odd occasions or make do with the incorrect time for one week by which time the change in British Summer Time will have happened and all will be OK.

There is still one time problem left to resolve. The clock on a PC will gradually drift. Eventually it will be a minute or two out.

On modern video recorders they have a very useful solution to this problem. They synchronise the video recorder clock to the clock on BBC1 teletext. This also copes with the changes due to British Summer Time. If you have a modern video recorder, which tunes the TV channels automatically, and the clock does not keep time check that you have BBC1 assigned to channel 1 of the video recorder.

If you look at the 'Innovations' catalogue that falls out of the Sunday supplement every so often you will see that you can buy clocks that synchronise themselves with the atomic clock time signal transmitted from Rugby. Is such technology available for the PC? The answer is yes. A company, I forget which, markets a device that is basically a clock synchronised by the Rugby transmitter which attaches to the serial port of a PC. Software is provided for the computer to access the clock at regular intervals and reset the onboard clock. There are two drawbacks however. The price was about £150 and the software was for network operating systems. This is not much good for the home user. However, there is a solution called Atomtime.

Atomtime started life as a little freeware utility, available from a number of different web pages. Such was its usefulness and success that its latest version, Atomtime98, has its own web page, costs money and has increased in size to a full bloatware product! Basically what it does is connect to a server on the Internet and compare your internal PC clock to the server's clock. If there is a difference you can synchronise your PC clock to the server's clock. The server is located in Colorado but the software takes into account any regional differences of the calling PC. The server time is controlled with an atomic clock signal of course. There are various options, such as connecting every time you access the Internet, but at its simplest just start the utility when you are surfing the web and you want to reset your PC clock accurately. It is a beautiful bit of software that is very useful. The following gives some links to various (freeware) versions that existed on the web when I last checked. There is a version 1.5 but the executable is no different from version 1.4. Later versions are not freeware. I have tested version 1.1 using Windows 95 and IE 4.01 with no problem. Download and enjoy.