03.14.07

Daylight Saving Time updates for Windows 2000 and 98

Posted in Assorted Tinkering at 9:37 pm by Brooks

I just found out today, when I turned my laptop on, that Microsoft’s “Windows Update” updates for Windows 2000 do not include a fix to make it compatible with the new version of Daylight Saving Time. (And, yes, apparently “Saving” is correct and “Savings” incorrect. I didn’t know that before.) Apparently since it’s not a security issue, they feel no need to actually do anything much about it.

There are, however, solutions. First, there’s the semi-official Microsoft solution, which involves some really hairy poking around in the system registry. (And, by “really hairy”, I mean that it looks signficantly more so than poking around in the system registry usually is.)

There’s also a handy little freeware utility that does those changes for you automatically, created by the fellow who runs IntelliAdmin.com. His blog post describing it is here, and the actual download is here. I tried it out, and as far as I can tell it worked perfectly (aside from not actually closing the window when done). He suggests setting your clock ahead to November to watch the time flip over to see if it worked, but it’s easier just to go into the “Time” control panel that you get from right-clicking on the clock and selecting “Adjust Date/Time”, and looking at the “Time Zone” panel to make sure it says “Pacific Daylight Time” (or whatever) rather than “Pacific Standard Time” for the time zone.

For those of you still running Windows 98, he also wrote a fix for that, even though there isn’t an official Microsoft solution at all. The blog post about that one is here, and the download is here.

It’s an interesting observation on advertising, too. It probably took him a day or so to code up this program and test it, and he’s now got a first-page Google hit for people looking for a solution to one of the bigger problems of the month — and people like me are passing around links to his blog, too. You just can’t buy advertising that good.

(The rest of his blog looks fairly interesting, too, if you’re doing Windows administration. This little trick for automatically putting the current date in a filename is particularly neat, for instance.)

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