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You cannot set the date, time, or time zone on your computer

Article ID: 300022 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q300022

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SYMPTOMS

You experience either of the following symptoms:

In Control Panel, when you click Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options, and then click Date and Time, you receive the following error message:
You do not have the proper privilege level to change the system time.
Changes that you make to the time zone on the Time Zone tab do not take effect.

As a result, you cannot set the date, time, or time zone on your computer.

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CAUSE

By default, only administrators and power users can change the date, time, or time zone.

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Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756

(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ )

How to back up and restore the registry in Windows

To resolve this issue, ask a member of the Power Users or Administrators administrative group for the local computer to assign you the necessary user right to change the time or date and to set the time zone. To do this, administrators must grant the Change system time user right, and then add the following permissions on the

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

registry key:

Query Value
Set Value
Create Subkey
Enumerate Subkey
Notify
Read Control

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STATUS

This behavior is by design.

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MORE INFORMATION

The system user right, SeSystemtimePrivilege, controls the ability to set the system time. Changing system time is a security-sensitive user right that affects the reliability of auditing, and is also used in Kerberos version 5 protocol negotiation. The default policy assigns SeSystemtimePrivilege to the Administrators and the Power Users groups. Time zone information is not security-sensitive, but it is a system-wide setting. By default, only members of the Administrators or the Power Users groups can change time zone information.

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