Microsoft is official technology partner for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, but they don’t appear to have got around to issuing a Windows patch to accomodate the summer time extension for the Games.
Soon, apparently.
Geek Rant dot org
Microsoft is official technology partner for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, but they don’t appear to have got around to issuing a Windows patch to accomodate the summer time extension for the Games.
Soon, apparently.
That’s forgetting that Windows doesn’t even support daylight saving all that cleanly. While Unix[-like] operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X keep the hardware clock as UTC and adjust the software clock dynamically for daylight saving, Windows still prompts you and only supports keeping the hardware clock as local time. Not very friendly for dual booting your PC either, though I suppose they don’t want you doing that!
I’m sure Linux will have support for the extended daylight saving in time, if it hasn’t already.
Raymond Chen explains why Windows keeps the hardware clock in local time in his blog here ..
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/02/224672.aspx
From a technically purist point of view I prefer the idea of setting the hardware clock to UTC, but how many of your average users are going to be able to convert local time to UTC when they try to set the time in the BIOS?
How many average users even know what the BIOS is? It either should be hidden from them or it too could convert to local time.
You can always use the Microsoft Timezone or tzedit utilities to change the daylight saving dates yourself. These utilities are part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools and can be downloaded from
I am not sure why Jeremy thinks that Windows doesn’t support daylight saving all that cleanly. The change is totally transparent, Windows hasn’t prompted for the change since back in Windows 95 days. We had 50,000 PCs switch over to daylight saving at the end of October and not a call to the Help Desk.
mgm
mgm’s link got lost… here it is: Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools, which includes timezone.exe, for editing the daylight saving start/end dates.
Here’s an older one for Win95, NT 3.51 and NT4. Hopefully it’s floating around for other versions (or this one works on them).
However, timezone.exe changes the dates to an exact day (eg the same every year). A better utility is tzedit.exe (found on Windows CDs) which can specify the change by the Xth day Y of month Z, reflecting how the real world works.