[time-nuts] Win XP and NIST Time

[Jim Lux]

On 3/23/13 7:27 AM, J. Forster wrote:
> I think the date for the DST time change were altered some years ago,
> hence the Win SW messes up. I keep the 'puter clock on local time for
> convenience, and switch because eBay does. I am only concerned with
> roughly accurate local time.



For the last few years, the US DST transition date has been changing 
every year (Congress can spend time arguing about whether DST should 
start or end earlier or later, rather than actually working on "hard" 
things).  It wouldn't surprise me that XP doesn't have an accurate table 
of this, since that would be one of the casualties of "being past 
support EOL" although the KB entries I link below indicate that they ARE 
still providing updates for XP.  There are a lot of places where 
timezones can go wrong because it's all stored in the registry and there 
have been updates over the years that are incremental and others that 
purport to be monolithic, etc.


This year, it changed very early (March 10) catching lots of people by 
surprise.

I also learned that if you set your timezone to Iceland/Mali (GMT+0) you 
get UTC without any Daylight time  (setting to London (GMT+0) gets you a 
shift for Summer Time)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2756822