Change current date and time for a specific application only

Question

We have a few internal tools and they have a common "bug" (maybe it's a feature): if it's a new month (like today: 1st of Febuary), you cannot access data from the last month (January) any more.

It's not critical to change data of the last month and my boss even requests me to change data of the last month. I'll then change the time of my PC, run the application and then change the time back.

This approach has several issues:

• some NTP things may change the time before I want it to
• I forget changing the time back
• files I create during that time have a wrong time stamp
• etc.

Therefore I'm looking for a tool that could report a different time to those affected programs only.

It needs to work on Windows 10 x64, for 32 and 64 bit target applications.

I have also considered:

• using a VM (virtual machine) as proposed by @PatrickMevzek in a comment. However, maintaining such a VM would be too much overhead during the "normal" days (not at a month change).

Answer 1

The famous Nir Sofer (Nir Soft) has a tool called RunAsDate, it:

allows you to run a program in the date and time that you specify. This utility doesn't change the current system date and time of your computer, but it only injects the date/time that you specify into the desired application. You can run multiple applications simultaneously, each application works with different date and time, while the real date/time of your system continues to run normally.

Download it on his site https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html

Of course, you cannot be sure it will work, it depends which method the software uses to retrieve the date and time.