Setting the time in Win7

[Bob Greschke]

On 2011-08-23 02:26:38 -0600, Tim Golden <mail at timgolden.me.uk> said:

> On 22/08/2011 20:42, Bob Greschke wrote:
>> Several people have been hacking away on this computer we are testing
>> on, so I'm not sure what settings -- other than all of them -- have been
>> messed with, but popen("time ...") seems to work, but system("time ...")
>> does not. I'm going to restore the machine to its original state and see
>> what happens.
> 
> Hoping that this helps: you can programatically set the system time
> from within Python by using the pywin32 modules, or ctypes if you
> prefer. The code below works for an already-elevated command prompt
> by enabling the SystemTime privilege and (crudely) moving the time
> forward by five minutes by way of showing what's happening before
> resetting it back.
> 
> I've commented out the actual SetSystemTime calls just in case anyone
> cuts-and-pastes indjudiciously. Ideally you should disable the
> privilege afterwards but I've left that out so as not to clutter
> the example.
> 
> <code>
> import os, sys
> 
> import win32api
> import win32security
> import ntsecuritycon
> 
> hToken = win32security.OpenProcessToken (
>    win32api.GetCurrentProcess (),
>    ntsecuritycon.MAXIMUM_ALLOWED
> )
> time_privilege = win32security.LookupPrivilegeValue (None, 
> win32security.SE_SYSTEMTIME_NAME)
> win32security.AdjustTokenPrivileges (
>    hToken, 0,
>    [(time_privilege, win32security.SE_PRIVILEGE_ENABLED)]
> )
> 
> current_time = win32api.GetSystemTime ()
> print "Current time:", current_time
> new_time = list (current_time)
> new_time[5] += 5
> ## print win32api.SetSystemTime (*new_time)
> print "Current time:", win32api.GetSystemTime ()
> ## print win32api.SetSystemTime (*current_time)
> print "Current time:", win32api.GetSystemTime ()
> 
> </code>
> 
> TJG

Oooo.  Now I can be dangerous.  We kinda also solved the whole thing 
for us (just a few minutes ago) by checking the checkbutton "Run as 
administrator" in the Properties, Compatibility tab, for python.exe and 
pythonw.exe.  The account is an Administrator, so it's OK for this.

I thought there must be a way through pywin32, but I don't know much of 
anything about Windows API calls.  I have a Windows Programming book 
collecting dust somewhere...

Thanks!

Bob