Disable Internet Synchronise Time - how useful?

A number of web sites include XP tweaks for music. e.g. Sound On Sound
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep06/articles/pcmusician_0906.htm

Usually one of the tweaks is:-

Disable Internet Synchronise Time

Navigate to the Internet Time page of the Date and Time applet and un-tick the option labelled 'Automatically synchronise with an Internet time server'.

Many people don't have any idea that their real-time system clock is, by default, synchronised to an Internet time server once a week, but it's a handy way to keep it accurate — assuming that you periodically connect your PC to the Internet, that is. If your music PC remains separate from the virus-ridden world of the Internet you might as well disable this function, as it won't work anyway.

Now, there must be some background process periodically checking whether the time has come to synchronise (the weekly default can be changed to daily or whatever in the registry).

However Task manager>performance shows no discernible difference, nor is there a difference in the number of processes, so I don't see this affecting the performance in any real way, except...

If the process decides to synchronise in the middle of, say, a multitrack recording will there be enough of a performance hit to make any difference?

BTW the command "w32tm /resync" (sans quotes) in a startup script will resync on every bootup, provided Internet Synchronise Time is enabled. If you do this, the next programmed resync will be a week away and therefore will not affect anything you do today.

Any thoughts on this?

However Task manager>performance shows no discernible difference, nor is there a difference in the number of processes, so I don't see this affecting the performance in any real way, except...

If the process decides to synchronise in the middle of, say, a multitrack recording will there be enough of a performance hit to make any difference?

I stopped all inessential processes, and tried a manual time update to see what happened. No processor hit whilst waiting for the update, and a very brief 4-5% CPU hit when the screen updated to tell me it had done it. I ran the test again with the latency checker running to see if anything happened at all (I wasn't expecting anything, but you never know...) and it didn't make a scrap of difference to that either.

BTW the command "w32tm /resync" (sans quotes) in a startup script will resync on every bootup, provided Internet Synchronise Time is enabled. If you do this, the next programmed resync will be a week away and therefore will not affect anything you do today.

Sounds like a result to me... If I'm going to record anything on the laptop, for instance, I don't disable the network options until after the machine has started. If you then switch off the wireless networking, and run enditall, then there are essentially no latency interruptions at all. Even if you don't do any of this, there aren't any either, but generally I do, just to be on the safe side.

But overall, as far as the time updater is concerned - what's all the fuss about?

Most of these guides telling you to stop unwanted processes assume the basic flaw that a process is doing something just because it exists.  In fact, most of the time they are just in a queue waiting for something to happen that they should respond to, and even then they will only be allowed to at an appropriate priority - i.e. they will not interfere with time-critical stuff at all.

There are, of course, badly written programs that you might install that could cause a problem - but that's a different matter from disabling background services which are a totally harmless part of the operating system.

Paul

Hmmm, I don't know whether this is relevant, but the bug where firewire did something weird seemed to relate to low-level timer functions themselves rather than whether they triggered any other action like the screensaver. Is the clock related to these internal timers? I don't know and probably will never have the time to find out.

What makes the original question a good one is that it is so difficult to get definitive answers about things like this. Most of what I have reported or asked about with Microsoft, Intel and various major machine manufacturers seems just to fall into a black hole. Maybe it's the blame/compensation culture, but it's not really good enough that the man on the Microsoft Vista development team and, earlier, Sony support just said "Yes mine does that, too" about different low-level faults.

Perhaps this is an argument for trying the Win7 beta (although it's probably too large a test to allow any meaningful contact) or switching to Linux and befriending a nerd? 

While these discussions are necessary (and useful) I think the bottom line is that if someone has a system which has no headroom left such that the slightest inkling of a process maybe starting up (or even thinking about starting up) maybe a cause of distraction to AA (and the underlying OS) then a rethink (read some sort of hardware upgrade) should be considered.

Having moved some years ago from the record looking through a letterbox (Korg D16) where there was no Windoze getting in the way I knew that significant hardware grunt is necessary to effectively and efficiently run an app like AA.

PS Don't get me wrong Alan's questions and the observations of both him & Steve etal are valuable and educational (much like the /3GB question)

But overall, as far as the time updater is concerned - what's all the fuss about?

I think that's the answer. Ironically, looking at it from another perspective, it's also a paraphrase of the original question!

... the slightest inkling of a process ...

Yeah, that's the case here I think.

Most of these guides telling you to stop unwanted processes assume the basic flaw that a process is doing something just because it exists.  In fact, most of the time they are just in a queue waiting for something to happen that they should respond to, and even then they will only be allowed to at an appropriate priority - i.e. they will not interfere with time-critical stuff at all.

Paul

Agreed. I think that especially applies to the idea of disabling services which some people will urge you to do. I really can't see any real difference in performance when you do.

If you really want to disable services one of the easiest ways is a script (AKA batch file) with lines like

net stop "alg"
net stop "dhcp"
etc.

The above will stop the Application Layer Gateway and DHCP client services. This method has no issues if you stop something you shouldn't - just reboot. You can also restart the services with another script where all the stop(s) are changed to start(s).

How do you know what names to use here? Start>Run and type services.msc, right-click a service and select Properties. Look at Service name.