Does your computer know about Daylight Savings Time?

Has your computer been keeping up with C-Span? Hopefully it has been because then your computer will know that Congress has changed Daylight Savings Time to start on 3/11/2007. Who, what, when, where, why? Here is a ‘Readers Digest Version’ taken from the Wall Street Journal, Feb 16th in the Marketplace section:

Congress adopted in 2005: “The Energy Policy Act of 2005” (As a side note, I’m curious does that mean that there was an Energy Policy Act of 1787??) Again WSJ reports: “The idea is to shrink the hours between sunset and bedtime so that people will reduce the amount of electricity they use at home, thereby saving energy.”

Ok, so saving energy, not a bad thing, switching a clock back a couple weeks early again not a bad thing so what is the problem?

Well, if you remember the Y2K bug? That HUGE problem that fizzled down to nothing because everyone caught it soon enough and it became a non problem? This is kinda/sorta the same thing. Microsoft and Apple both have updates to fix this in fact Microsoft released theirs on Feb 12th. Windows Vista users have the fix already in the program. Apple has sent out the updates for OS X, if you have OS 9.2 or before Apple is suggesting that you just manually update the clocks. (I do have to wonder why that isn’t on the Microsoft site as well I mean that seems like a pretty easy fix to me. I’m already going to set my clocks ahead/back whatever. But then again I don’t have billions of dollars either like some folks at Microsoft.)

Now, finally what happens if you don’t get the update? You might wind up scheduling an appt. for 10am and you would miss the appt. because you’re an hour off. There are some anti virus issues that could crop up but for the most part it is again a lot less of a problem now because most of the fixes are in. But a manual fix of your comptuers clock should take care of the problem.

So, what this all boils down to is what LTOL is always saying: “Keep up with your Microsoft/Windows/Office updates and you should be ok.”