Daylight Saving Time and Windows

A number of my clients have asked me recently if they need to be worried about the early change to daylight savings time this year. You remember, don't you: clocks get rolled forward on March 11th this year as the new law lengthening Daylight Saving Time takes effect. Here's the deal: The Windows operating system assumes it knows when to start Daylight Savings Time in the United States. If you have installed all your OS updates - and you are on XP, 2003, or Vista - you should be fine. But if you are still running Windows 2000, your clock will not change properly. No daylight savings time update has been released for Windows 2000. According to the always helpful Geeks are Sexy blog, Microsoft is releasing patches to update 2003, XP, and Vista to the new 2007 Daylight Saving Time. They will not release a patch for 2000, and customers are told to manual patch their OS via a few registry tweaks or to simply upgrade to a newer version of Windows. If you have a large Windows 2000 installation, you might want to look at a utility from IntellAdmin to handle this for you. There's even bigger worries for is users of Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, for which no free patch will be made available at all. Check out the links on that Geeks are Sexy post for much more information and lots of links on how the time change will impact Windows, Outlook, and Exchange Server.