Daylight saving time change: What your PC needs to know
Daylight saving time signed a change-of-address form, packing up its old home on the first weekend in April for the pre-spring locale of the second Sunday in March. With modern operating systems adjusting the time automagically, the shift to an earlier DST means your computer needs to be (or may already have been) informed of the change. For users of Vista, updates have already been applied to compensate for the change. XP systems with automatic updates turned on should be OK as well but, if you're still using Windows ME, 98 or 95 you'll need to manually update your clock (and then manually re-adjust when the OS changes your time for you on the old date). Oddly, Microsoft's own advisory on the DST change makes no mention of Windows 2000, or Microsoft server environments.
For Mac users, Apple's auto update system should have taken care of things already. If you're paranoid (like me) and want to check things for yourself, Mac OSX Hints has published a great guide on making the changes required for the new date which, given OSX's Unix underpinnings, is also valid for Linux users. Taking a few minutes now to make sure you're all set for the switch will save you any embarrassing moments come March 11.












Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsDFeb 15th 2007 2:32PM
2000 won't get the update. It's considered a feature upgrade and not a critical patch, which is the only kind of patch 2000 gets as part of Microsoft's strategy to force upgrades of its most stable OS. There is a little known utility call TZedit.exe that should do the trick though.
brianr9144Feb 16th 2007 5:07PM
Grant you might want to also note for folks that if they use Outlook they'll need to run a separate utility to update all existing calendar items to the new time. Also available at the MS site.
robertFeb 23rd 2007 10:32PM
We used this nice little utility for our "unsupported" NT 4 and 2000 machines. It works on the local machine and also remotely
http://ezpcsoft.esitehosting.com
Dave AndersMar 7th 2007 9:39AM
The daylight savings update utility from http://ezpcsoft.esitehosting.com works great.
I downloaded the free one for NT 4 and 2000. So simple one click.
Now they have a new one that can be deployed using logon scripts across the network. For the number of servers and machines i need to update I'm going that route pretty cheap too