I want to set the date on my windows 7 Home Premium 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.
And I did what Natsu Gage suggested:
net stop w32time
and then
w32tm /unregister
But that had no affect other than to kill the time server connection (a good thing!).
I also tried using the "date" command in the CLI as SU. That seemed to work but it had no affect on the date in the panel and then when I ran the "date" command it reported today's date unchanged.
Edit many hours later: OK these are all the things I have done to figure this out.
- I changed the date in my UEFI even though I didn't think that would matter. It didn't matter.
- I changed the date in the host. Linux wouldn't let me do that even when I logged in as root. Just as well. I do want auto date and time in the host.
- I went through the registry file. I found there was a "datetime.cpl" (or maybe timedate.cpl?) being called in a number of entries. But since they were inside Windows hieroglyphics entries and I don't know what I am doing with those, I left them alone.
- I found w32time nestled all nice and cozy inside a service host call. When I saw that I disabled the Ethernet card in the virtual machine (apparently that also disables it in the host!)) so that we could positively eliminate w32time as the culprit. I then rebooted.
- I opened task manager to see what processes and services were running but found no likely candidates. But there were a dozen service hosts running that could have been hiding it. Virtualbox guest additions was also running.
- I then logged in as super administrator and changed the date using CLI "date" command. I had done this before to no avail but I did notice a 10 second lag before the date changed back to today in the panel. So I opened task manager, sorted by CPU use and watched as I hit the enter on the date command. Sure enough for the briefest moment a service host process logged cpu time at the exact moment the date changed in the panel.
Third Update Edit:
I forgot to mention that following a suggestion from Natsu Gage, I ran:
sc qtriggerinfo w32time
The result was:
The specific service does not exist as an installed service
And therefor that corroborated the fact that the w32time service was not doing the automatic date updating. Since Microsoft says that it is the only service which updates time and date, that strengthens my suspicion that Virtualbox is doing it.
CONCLUSION: Virtual box guest additions is the only possible program that could be using service host to make the date changes and it is getting the date time from the host system. So I need to go and post on their forum.
I would never have got this far without Natsu Gage's help. He/she gave me search criteria for google that I would never have thought of (I am old) and they were extremely helpful.
