The following will guide you through the procedure of running a fast sync via geth --fast on Windows OS 10 for Mist for those running their Ethereum Wallet client for the first time.
Note:--fast can only be run if you are syncing your blockchain from scratch and only the first time you download the blockchain for security reasons, always ensure you are using the latest release; github.com/ethereum/mist/releases/.
Step 1: Open command prompt (Administrative privileges not required;Don't run as Administrator):
...
- Right click time (a) at the bottom right of the your screen as shown in picture below:
- Select Adjust date/time and click Additional date, time & regional settings (a) in picture below located near the bottom right of your page.
- Click set date and time(a) as shown in picture below:
- Click Internet Time (a) and Change settings (b):
- Click synchronize with internet server time(a), select time.windows.com as your server, click update(b) and press OK.(c)
- Right click time (a) at the bottom right of the your screen as shown in picture below:
This should fix the network time error and your would see geth client continue to download till the latest block.
What is really going on?
Instead of processing the entire blockchain one link at a time, and replay all transactions that ever happened in history, fast syncing downloads the transaction receipts along the blocks, and pulls an entire recent state database.