Not sure what you mean. I've never had issues with timezones or DST.

I just thought I'd ask about DST because even SP3 for XP doesn't include the correct patches for this year.

After my OS repair with an SP3 slip-streamed boot disc, my system this weekend was showing the incorrect time. I had to download a new post-SP3 update to fix it. Again today when I moved to new hardware the same thing happened.

Just wondering if they'd forgotten the updates again. Nothing wonky with your time this weekend? This Sunday clocks should go back an hour if everything's ok with the OS timezone tables.

Hah! One of the most significant design problems with Windows is how it handles time. Its internal clock is based on local time, which means that its internal clock jumps by an hour twice a year (in places with Summer Time). And its time zone tables can only hold two different set of time zone rules. And this includes Exchange. When the US time zones changed last year, cross-zone meeting times were screwed up for weeks.

In summary, how Windows deals with time blows.

Ah yes, I remember that. I was working at a law firm at the time and everyone freaked out. But I thought that was due to the change in DST that year, not a problem that existed in prior years.

And I guess the difference we're talking about is with corporate machines. I was talking about home computers, as that's primarily what I'm concerned with these days. With my own personal computer I've not run into time difficulties that I can remember.

It can wreak havoc at home too, for instance with my PVR server. Wrong time means wrong recordings. On top of the Windows issues, Java (what SageTV is written in) has its own bloody time and you need to update that separately on top of the updates for Windows.

The new US DST rules took effect in 2007 and had been planned for a long time before that. Plenty of time for anyone to make a dozen updates ahead of schedule. MS has had to issue time zone hotfixes every year since then, which also include changes to other countries of course. Even when you sync with a time-server, if your tables are off, you won't get the correct time. Yesterday, before the latest update, I was off by 2 hours after a sync.

Speaking of sync, does Windows 7 always work with ntp? I had to do a song and dance ad some registry fiddling to make sure XP would properly hit the nntp server for updates. And then I had to use Apple's server to get accurate time.

NTP not NNTP. NNTP is the Network News Transfer Protocol.

The Windows NTP has always worked for me since the XP days. I've never had to fiddle with it.

Heh, morning-typo. I still haven't had breakfast. It would be interesting to get time data from old usenet posts though, wouldn't it?

NTP works fine on my XP and Win2k3 boxes. For some reason it doesn't seem to work properly on my single Vista box. It works if I kick off a sync manually, sometimes, but never seems to manage to sync automatically.

Apparently not all governments are so considerate.

Peter

Wow. I would expect a sudden change like that to totally screw with the country. Changing all the IT systems to not go to DST alone would be a massive job.

It works well on our XP machines on 2003 servers, on two time zones (GMT+1, GMT-5)that change time on different days, and Exchange server for both sharing calendars in both time zones. Never had an issue with NTP cross the entire organization with Windows machines either. I do have issues with NTP from our of the org time servers, at times, including the default time.windows.com .
I never tried this on Vista in a corp environment, and never looked into how the time handling works in Windows, actually. I neve knew anything about this issue, as it simply "just worked" for us.

NTP support under Windows has always sucked, and likely always will suck. For one thing, it only really supports SNTP. It can sorta pretend to be an NTP server for other hosts on your network, but it screws up the stratum (it always sets it to the same number, regardless of its source), which screws up trying to use it with any other NTP server. It also isn't very accurate. It only stays within a few seconds of the real time, which is lousy. Good enough for government work, but, really? That's the best they could do?

Well, just got my copies in the mail. It'll take a little while to install them all, but I don't mind.

XP Mode = eh. Had to install it today, because some Microsoft J# component in VMWare vCenter admin blew up on install in Microsoft Windows 7, and it's a known incompatibility.

So for something that is supposed to be part of Windows 7, I had to go manually download the VM, and some extra support files. After installing, it's buried in the start menu, and starts up the first time with XP having it's own desktop. Tried to drag and drop the installer into it, no go. Expected it to map common folders like "My Documents" to the same place in 7, nope. Finally found it had connected my real hard drives into the VM like a network share.

Once the app was installed, it ran still inside the XP box. Had to shut it all down, then run the app from the 7 start menu to get it to show up as just an app without the XP box around it.

Oddly Windows XP running under Parallels Coherence or VMWare's Unity on OS X is more integrated then Windows XP on Windows 7.

Proof Windows 7 is evil :-)

Oh, and for people who dual boot on a system that likes to keep the clock set to UTC (IE, every civilized system in the world except pure Windows boxes), the RealTimeIsUniversal registry setting was fixed in Vista SP2, 7 and 2008 R2. Anyone running Windows on a Mac should set this to avoid time wonkyness when booting between the two OSes.