Solved How to freeze the system date to a specific date or disable date.

[mcho]

I want to set the date on my windows 7 virtual machine to Jan X, 2009 (any day in that month). Or if I cannot do that set the date to Jan X, 2009 and then let it increment normally after that (less desirable) but I can live with it. I have tried this already but the system changes it back to today and nothing I do can stop it.



There is no point in telling me about secpol.msc because that does not exist in the home editions. Does anyone know how to disable date inside the bowels of the beast? Perhaps using the CLI?

 

[Bree]

I want to set the date on my windows 7 virtual machine to Jan X, 2009 (any day in that month). Or if I cannot do that set the date to Jan X, 2009 and then let it increment normally after that (less desirable) but I can live with it. I have tried this already but the system changes it back to today and nothing I do can stop it.

Welcome to Seven Forums @mcho


I've just tried that in a Windows 7 Hyper-V virtual machine. Even with Internet time turned off it resets to today's date. Interestingly, you CAN set it to a date in the future and it will stick.

So where is it getting the current date from? The answer is the host OS. If you set the date of the host to 1st Jan 2009 then you can set the W7 VM's date to 1st Jan 2009 too (or any date after that, just not an earlier date). Setting the host's time back by a decade is probably something you don't want to do, so...

If you're using VMWare for your VM, this is how to disable time synchronisation between host and VM.

VMware Knowledge Base

This is how to do it in Hyper-V (it works, I've tested it).

windows - Disabling time synchronization with Hyper-V - Super User

 

[samuria]

Why do you want to do that for a start all internet certificates will be out of data so you wont be able to get to a lot of websites

 

[mcho]

Thanks Bree. I will try that as a test. I am not using Vmware (believe me I tried - I prefer to buy software so that I can get support when I need it) But it does not work in Linux Mint very well without serious problems. Virtualbox on the other hand worked perfectly without having to fiddle with it so that's what I am using.



When I installed VB and VM next to each other to test using a Windows 7 as a guest (I have three licenses for it) I had a great deal of difficulty and many error messages so I gave up since VB was working flawlessly. Maybe VB is designed more with Linux in mind? I did notice that the two seem to share code (based on their behavior) so I will see if there is something like that in VB.



By the way, I used the latest stable edition from their sites. I did not use a Linux Mint installation. So VB is version 6.1 and I can't remember which version of VM but it was whatever VM was providing. Too bad, I really like VM, and on my windows 10 machine at work it works flawlessly and I use it a lot.



Samuria

Your question is off-topic and does not contribute to the answer to this question.



But to answer your question, there is no way I would ever let a home Windows computer access the internet except very briefly for a specific task. Of course at work it is out of my control but they have a very robust firewall and commercial Windows does not have all the Microsoft spyware, Microsoft malware, and Microsoft adware that home versions do. They simply do not let Microsoft call home and they do not allow automatic updates. They control and install updates themselves after the update has been thorougly inspected for Microsoft spyware. They also use Linux a LOT. All firewalls, routers, mail servers, and DNS servers are Linux. Which is where I learned to use it.

 

[mcho]

Bree I forgot to mention (and this might be important for someone with a similar issue) that I completely eliminated the 32wtime service by stopping it and then unregistering it. I also disabled the internet connection because I would not normally have that on anyway, and checked the registry file where I saw the 32wtime was being called by a service host process. Because there as a 10 second delay between changing the date on the command line as a super administrator before the date on the panel reverted, I turned on the process monitor, sorted by CPU time, and when I hit the enter button I observed what process or service was using CPU time. Sure enough, it was a service host at the exact moment when the date reverted just like you said so that is clearly the issue.


Thanks for your help. I can use the VM terminology to search the VB knowledge base to see how to do it there.

 

[Bree]

Thanks for your help. I can use the VM terminology to search the VB knowledge base to see how to do it there.

I found these for you....

How to disable time sync with Windows 7 as host OS in VirtualBox? - Super User

...and apparently you may be able to do it from within the guest too.

vagrant - How to disable VirtualBox time sync from within the guest at runtime - Stack Overflow

 

[mcho]

A big thanks to Bree. Without his/her help I would never have found these solutions!

Knowing the correct terminology sure makes a big difference in search results! So it turns out that "Virtualbox guest additions" does in fact update the time in a virtual machine and they provide a way to turn that off. Wish I had known that to start with!

Also the manual has information but I certainly did not understand any of it on first read but you might:

Chapter 9. Advanced Topics

The key to this is knowing the right search terms which is:
"Disable time sync between guest and host"

When I began this thread I did not know that Virtualbox Guest Additions was causing the problem and therefore wasted a lot of time. Also it never occurred to me to post in the Linux/Unix forum since I thought it was a Windows issue.

 

[Bree]

A big thanks to Bree. Without his/her help I would never have found these solutions!

Knowing the correct terminology sure makes a big difference in search results!

I'm lucky, I seem to have a 'google-sense' for choosing the right search terms


(Oh, and I'm male BTW)