If you’ve got some older systems or a new netbook that can’t quite handle Vista , you might be hanging onto Windows XP longer than you thought.  Out of the box, XP and the new DST changes don’t get along.  As a result of The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, the United States has an extended daylight saving period that lasts 3-4 weeks longer than in years prior to 2007.  But there’s a fix!

There’s a handful of ways to update your computer so that it supports the new DST dates: downloading an EXE update, manual registry changes, TZEdit, and some others.  For a single machine, I found the most straight-forward way to update your machine is through TZEdit.

1. Download TZEdit.
2. Run TZEdit.exe to extract it to the default directory (C:\Program Files\TZEDIT).
3. Run C:\Program Files\TZEDIT\TZEdit.exe.
4. The timezone configured on your machine should be automatically selected.
5. Click the Edit button.
6. Change the Start Day to the Second Sunday of March at 2:00am.
7. Change the Last Day to the First Sunday of November at 2:00am.
8. Click OK.
9. I found to get the settings to stick I had to change time zones in the Date and Time Properties window (the window that pops up when you double-click the time in the tray).  Change to some other time zone, and then change back to your original time zone.
10. Now reboot.
11. To test, change your date/time to the second Sunday of March at 1:59:59am.  If all went well, you should “spring” forward to 3:00am.

If you’d like more technical information on more advanced configuration, jump over to Microsoft’s Help Page.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 12:13 am and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.