It sounds like you are making a good argument for running Pro rather than Home. I run Pro only. Checking this system, the Windows Time service is disabled and NTP is enabled and running. It makes sense for a Home system to make changes like this in order to keep things running for users who probably don’t understand matters at this level. There may very well be a work-around that will keep WTS turned off.
Dave / NX6D ________________________________ From: Matt Power <mhpo...@mit.edu> Sent: Monday, December 3, 2018 7:13:17 PM To: wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [wsjt-devel] use of NTP with WSJT-X disrupted by Windows 10 updates WSJT-X on Windows has generally expected that the machine has third-party NTP software and doesn't use the Windows Time service. This affects clock accuracy, and consequently affects decoding performance in various ways, including the possibility of being affected by the recently identified "negative DT" issue. It may be important to know that recent Windows software, including at least Windows 10 Home 10.0.17134, can automatically change the system configuration to turn on the Windows Time service if the end user has disabled it. Here's a specific scenario in which a WSJT-X user may have done a proper time-synchronization setup that was later "helpfully" undone by Microsoft: 1. The user was originally using 1.9.x on Windows 10 and carefully read https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx-doc/wsjtx-main-1.9.1.html 2. This says "The built-in Windows facility for time synchronization is usually not adequate. We recommend the program Meinberg NTP (see Network Time Protocol Setup" and links to http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/setup.html 3. That page says "You should also check in the Control Panel, Local Services, that the Windows Time service is set to Disabled." (Similarly, https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/info/ntp-w32time.htm says "Note that w32time service may only be enabled when no other ntp daemon is installed on your system. Otherwise the two services come into conflict.") 4. If the user followed all of those instructions, then that configuration ordinarily would have stayed in place across reboots/updates/etc. HOWEVER, this may have recently changed, with no notice, to a misconfiguration in which BOTH Windows Time and Meinberg NTP are running. To check for this possibility: 5. On the Windows 10 system, start Event Viewer and go to "Windows Logs" and then "System" 6. Look for events with Level=Information, Source=Service Control Manager, Event ID=7040 7. You might notice one or more recent events of "The start type of the Windows Time service was changed from disabled to demand start." In my case, the only one was at 8 AM local time on December 2. (I was not using my computer at that time.) Similarly, you might notice, as I did, that the Windows Time service is now running, whereas previously it was not. Also -- and this is NOT NECESSARILY related -- you might notice, as I did, that FT8 decoding with 2.0.0-rc5 suddenly started to fail intermittently, soon after that Windows event happened. (Very roughly: 70% of receive cycles have a plausible number of decodes, and 30% have zero decodes.) Other notes: If anyone is seeing poor 2.0.0-rc5 decoding performance, you might want to do something like: stop the Windows Time service, restart the Network Time Protocol Daemon service, restart WSJT-X, and look at whether that helped. I don't yet know of a best long-term fix. I don't know all of the possible impacts of running Windows Time and third-party NTP simultaneously. Almost certainly, WSJT-X decoding will be worse, but how much worse is hard to predict. It may depend on various race conditions that vary with the specific vendor and version of the NTP software. Over the past two years or so, Microsoft has been making a number of changes with the goal of blocking the ability of Windows 10 Home users to skip updates. For example, if you make a manual change to disable a service such as Windows Update or Background Intelligent Transfer Service, then it will be re-enabled automatically. Possibly, Windows Time is the latest addition to the set of forbidden changes. I haven't seen this announced or discussed anywhere, though. If Microsoft indeed does not want Windows 10 Home users to control their own Windows Time service, then there might not be any supported workaround. The only workaround might be unsupported (changing the registry, scripts to re-disable, etc.). When Microsoft takes this type of step (e.g., Service Control Manager policy changes), it typically goes into effect on different people's PCs at different times over a period of weeks or months. It is possible that this has overlapped much of the WSJT-X 2.0.0-rc release cycle. In other words, for an unknown subset of users, seeing unexpectedly few decodes with one of the 2.0.0-rc releases is not caused by any WSJT-X defects, WSJT-X misconfigurations, or user errors. It is entirely the consequence of a Windows behavior in which time services are automatically and silently misconfigured, after working correctly for months or years. Matt, KA1R _______________________________________________ wsjt-devel mailing list wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
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