Double-Daylight time under XP?

As often happens, I may have guessed wrong about the proper home for this. So feel free to move it if appropriate.

In older versions of Win (my last was 98SE), if I remember correctly, the system's auto-adjust to Daylight time (or back to Standard in the fall) didn't occur till your first bootup afterwards, and you got a popup advising it had been changed and suggesting you double-check that it was correct.

My XP is now something like 3 or 4 years old, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it "silently" made the change while you were still running.

I ran into a new one last night -- it did change correctly at 2 AM. But this morning I realized, only after a while, that it was an hour fast, implying that it made the change again when I booted up this morning.

Anyone else run into this? I'm using XP (home) with SP2 and all subsequent updates, and system has been thoroughly scanned for (and is apparently clean of) malware. Possibly related to one of the subsequent Critical updates, or possibly a disabled service?

 

Do you have the right Time Zone ? I would check this first.
You will find Date and Time Settings in the Control Panel.

 

Yup, still showing US/Canada Eastern time, with the auto-change Daylight time thing ticked, never touched any of that.

Slightly off-topic, I hear that the US is extending Daylight time by about three weeks this (?) year, and Canada will follow suit next year. Guess we'll see a patch from MS for that, like they had to do for Australia this year.

 

My XP is the same age as yours Mike and didn't change at all. I adjusted it this morning.

As to Daylight Savings Time being extended, i would like to see it all year round, ridding us of Standard Time.


snowbound

 

The only thing I can think of is that you have an additional software installed that adjusts your clock via an atomic clock on the internet, but with a wrong time zone.
These softwares work indeed, if you like the exact time on your computer, but I never found one without spyware.
My old computer (5-6 years old) has never the exact time, but it always adjusts my PC clock automatically during the Daylight change.

I trust more my radio-controlled clock on the wall, which has always the exact time, but she isn't perfect either.
During the Daylight Time change, she isn't adjusted immediately and certainly not after midnight. She adjusts itself somewhere in the next day and that is in fact too late.
My assumption is that nobody is willing to wake up so early in the morning (2-3 AM) to adjust this time-sending clock in his pyjamas and then go back to bed.

 

A couple of other ways...

• A multiboot machine in which the correction is made for all/both boots. After all, the time is hardware, the correction is a software flag and the OS's are independent.
• A subset of the above, if the machine is reverted to a prior state and performs the adjustment again. Haven't tried it, but I'm sure I could create a ShadowUser scenario to do this. I'm sure any like-behaving product would yield the same result.

Those are a couple that occur to me. The basic scheme is reversion of a software state (either directly or through a independently existing instances) which resets an independent hardware state.

Blue

 

BlueZannetti,
Thanks for mentioning it. I learn something new everyday

 

Thanks all. I don't have multi-boot or an automatic time-sync thingie, nor (as far as I know) was there any kind of system rollback. So I guess it was just a stray cosmic ray or something equally unpredictable -- everything's fine after I reset the clock.

For synching to an atomic clock, I like Gregory Braun's WebTime, which has no detectible spyware and which I use strictly on-demand once or twice a month, or if for some reason my time looks out of whack. I think it includes an option for auto-running when you boot.

 

• 
  Yes, happens to my dual boot system - the OS that is booted up 2nd adjusts by 2 hours.
  
  Regards - Charles