Comment NTP Client (Score 2) 95
Many years ago, I discovered Socket Watch (swatch.exe). It was purchase-ware but relatively inexpensive; I recall it was about $10. The company that developed it -- Locutus Codeware renamed as Robomagic) was based in Canada. In an exchange of E-mails, the company said they would accept Can$10; so I had my daughter (living in Canada) pay them. I reimbursed her about US$7.50, which was the exchange rate for Can$10. That was at least 20 years ago. Through various Windows versions, I still use it.
Robomagic is no longer in business. Before liquidating, they made the last version (3.5b ) of Socket Watch freeware. Fortunately I archived a copy of its installer.
Socket Watch works off a list of over 100 time sources. Some are atomic clocks, and others synchronize to atomic clocks. On initializing after installation, the entire list is queried and scored. The responses are scored according to how quickly the sources respond; low scores are better than high. The list is then sorted by scores, lowest to highest. Socket Watch then takes a subset of top sources and periodically queries them; the size of the subset and the frequency of how often they are queried are user-settable. The responses are scored again, and the response with the lowest new score is used to reset my PC's clock. If any source in the subset has a higher score than a source not in the subset, it is replaced from the total list.
I setup Socket Watch to have a subset of 5 and to query the subset every hour. Since Robomagic no longer exists to distribute updates of the list of time sources, I occasionally visit http://support.ntp.org/bin/vie... to update my total list of servers. Following rules stated at that site, I only use servers that are not restricted to geographical locations that are not mine and for which I do not need prior permission to query. Fudging one rule, I do include Stratum 1 (atomic clock) servers.