Hardware

Configure Windows to support UTC clock

If you configured your computer to dual boot between Windows and Linux and you don’t live under the GMT time zone, you may have noticed that the time under Linux is always off and if you attempt to correct it, it will be off under Windows. The problem is that Windows expects the BIOS time to be set directly to your local time while Linux expects it to be set to UTC and correct it for your time zone on run time (be sure that Linux has the correct time zone). To fix this problem you have to configure Windows to support UTC clock.
UTC is the French (become worldwide popular) abbreviation of “Coordinated Universal Time” and it is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time and it is the most popular successors to the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Like to GMT, to calculate your local time you need to take the UTC time and add your time zone difference and eventually the daylight saving time difference if your nation follow it and it is summertime.

To configure Windows to support UTC clock you just need to add a key to the Windows registry.
The first thing I recommend you to do is to manually set the time to coincide to UTC; you can do it on both Windows or Linux and you can check the current UTC time on the following site.
Than log to Windows, if you were under Linux, open the “Start Menu“, go to “Run“, and run “regedit“.
Once the “Registry Editor” is open go to the following path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

And inside there create a new “DWORD (32-bit)” by right click an open area (on the right quadrant) and click “New > DWORD (32-bit)”. Set the name as “RealTimeIsUniversal” (without quotation marks) and change the value to 1.

Press the OK button, close the “Registry Editor” and reboot the computer.
Now you should have the correct time on both systems.

Marco Di Fresco