How to make Windows use UTC for reading the clock

Topics: Operating system

When running Linux and Windows on the same machine, one of the operating systems will display the wrong time. That’s because Linux usually reads the machine’s real time clock as UTC while Windows interprets it as the local time (zone).

This can be fixed by switching Windows to UTC time as well. The procedure has two steps:

1. Turn off automatic time updates.
2. Use the Registry Editor to add a new key/value pair under HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\TimeZoneInformation. The key is RealTimeIsUniversal. Its DWORD value needs to be 1 to make Windows interpret the real time clock as UTC.