Taskbar clock time frozen

This morning, the clock on my system tray stopped updating itself about an hour after I turned on the computer. It is plugged in and has been plugged in for days on end without being carried around the house. If I go into the control panel and look at date/time, the time is right, it just isn't updated on the system tray anymore. I tried modifying the time zone to see if it would redisplay the clock - no. I tried dragging the taskbar around to see if it would refresh the clock - no.

I have not yet rebooted, that might very well fix it at least temporarily - but I thought I'd ask if this is something people have already seen and solved by restarting a service or some such system fix. I googled a bit and read the similar posts retrieved from here, eightforums, sevenforums, and the useless ones from Microsoft that recommend safe mode and DISM for everything...

Interesting tidbit is that if I right-click on the clock and choose Adjust Date/Time, it doesn't do anything. Once it returned a dialog saying something about there being no service associated, but now I can't get that dialog to come back.

Thanks again to everyone here for being consistently smarter than Microsoft...

Samsung laptop, Windows 10, Avast antivirus, Emsisoft Antimalware, Windows Firewall

fotyc said:

This morning, the clock on my system tray stopped updating itself about an hour after I turned on the computer. It is plugged in and has been plugged in for days on end without being carried around the house. If I go into the control panel and look at date/time, the time is right, it just isn't updated on the system tray anymore. I tried modifying the time zone to see if it would redisplay the clock - no. I tried dragging the taskbar around to see if it would refresh the clock - no.

I have not yet rebooted, that might very well fix it at least temporarily - but I thought I'd ask if this is something people have already seen and solved by restarting a service or some such system fix. I googled a bit and read the similar posts retrieved from here, eightforums, sevenforums, and the useless ones from Microsoft that recommend safe mode and DISM for everything...

Interesting tidbit is that if I right-click on the clock and choose Adjust Date/Time, it doesn't do anything. Once it returned a dialog saying something about there being no service associated, but now I can't get that dialog to come back.

Thanks again to everyone here for being consistently smarter than Microsoft...

Samsung laptop, Windows 10, Avast antivirus, Emsisoft Antimalware, Windows Firewall

Try this:
Navigate in 'Modern Settings' to the location in the screenshot, turn on 'Set time automatically' (1); if it is on, turn it off, click 'Change' (2) then 'Cancel' (3) then turn (1) back on.



It may also be your CMOS battery.

Edwin said:

Try this:
Navigate in 'Modern Settings' to the location in the screenshot, turn on 'Set time automatically' (1); if it is on, turn it off, click 'Change' (2) then 'Cancel' (3) then turn (1) back on.

Well, I couldn't get Modern Settings to open by any of the available ways - nor could I open any of the 'modern' apps such as the calculator. And I could not get the menu to open by left-clicking on the little window - only right click opened so I chose 'restart' and it gave me the blue screen that said 'restarting' but never progressed or showed disk activity, so I ended up using the power button. And now it is fine. So it seems that some essential service died at the time the clock stopped, and it was preventing several of the Windows 10-specific things from working. No idea what that could have been! Thanks, by trying what you suggested I discovered the problem was something more global.