[VoIP] DST change in Windows

[Steph Kerman]

(Excerpts of Chad's message follows, full message below that)

Chad Perkins wrote:
> Steph, can you confirm if this message is properly "dated" ?
Your message arrived moments ago bearing a 2:54 PM EDT timestamp. It is 
3:15 PM EDT as I write this. The majority of the messages I am receiving 
have timestamps only a few minutes earlier than their arrival times 
except for those that are approximately an hour into the future, which 
are clearly incorrect. So it appears that my machine is properly 
synchronized with the real world.

My interest in making people aware when their clocks are incorrect is 
that it helps make the messages appear in sequence in the inbox, making 
it much easier to follow a thread. When messages are 1 hour off it makes 
following a thread much more difficult because many irrelevant messages 
are interleaved between the messages of a given thread.
> Failing to fix the DST definition WILL cause future failures of 
> correct time unless you plan on manually correcting the clock every 
> March and November for the rest of your life, or have some other 
> program sync the time all the time.
Thanks for all the info.  I certainly think that TZEDIT is a 
preferable.  At the time I found out about the XP patch I searched the 
Microsoft site, found nothing, spoke with generally knowledgeable 
friends and was told that AFA they knew, MS was withdrawing support for 
the older systems and I should not expect to find a solution from MS.  
Accordingly I resorted to the manual method to deal with the immediate 
problem and soon discovered that the time zone needed to be fudged to 
get correct results. 

If there were no better solution, I personally would find bumping my TZ 
twice a year completely unobjectionable.  It's far less of a nuisance 
than resetting all the digital clocks that need to be spun 23 hours 
forward once a year.

One question that came up which I have not gained any insight into is 
how, when you use Yahoo webmail or Gmail, those webmail servers 
determine the correct time for the logged-in user.  Anyone know?  
Playing with your local PC clock has no immediate affect on the 
timestamps on those messages.  Perhaps a reboot is needed for the 
webmail servers to see a new time.  SMTP/POP mail message timestamps are 
affected immediately when your TOD or TZ setting is changed.

Steph

Chad's message in full ahead ==>

Chad Perkins wrote:
> I appreciate the fact that Steph has played "time" monitor (DST and 
> otherwise) on a
> number of lists. Having peoples clocks reasonably correct help the 
> list(s) run
> smoothly. A lot of people, would be unaware that something was amiss, 
> myself
> included, if Steph hadn't pointed it out (he caught me with a out of 
> whack clock
> before on another list before the DST crap came to be).
>
> However,
>
> On 6 Apr 2007 at 15:47, Steph Kerman wrote:
> [snip]
>> One needs to turn off auto-adjustment by unchecking the box and if
>> correcting manually one needed to bump the time zone and then correct
>> the time setting.
>> Steph
>
> Fix it, disabling DST is not the answer. There has been a MS tool called
> TZEDIT.EXE that has been around since atleast windows 98 that "fixes" 
> this problem
> without the MS "patch".
>
> There are two versions of TZEDIT, one for Windows 9x, one for 
> XP/2000/NT(?). So
> there is no reason that anyone shouldn't be able to fix this problem. 
> I have used
> TZEDIT, I believe successfully, on all of my machines both at work and 
> at home (XP
> SP1, ME, 98SE, 95A and 95B none of which appear to be patchable). 
> Steph, can
> you confirm if this message is properly "dated" ?
>
> Download the appropriate TZEDIT.EXE and run it (there is no installer).
> Select your timezone.
> Click Edit.
> Set 'Start Day' to Second Sunday of March
> Set 'Last Day' to First Sunday of November.
> (leave/turn 'Automatically set DST on)
> Click 'OK'.
> Click 'Close' and you are done (assuming other aspects of your time 
> settings haven't
> been already mucked up, in which case you'd have to undo that).
>
> Failing to fix the DST definition WILL cause future failures of 
> correct time unless you
> plan on manually correcting the clock every March and November for the 
> rest of your
> life, or have some other program sync the time all the time.
>
> While I am not an expert in this department, but I have been told that 
> NTP uses delta
> UTC and thus relies on the client to correctly interpret the offset. 
> As such it is my
> understand that using NTP won't fix this (but it would be accurately 
> "off" by an hour
> one way or another).
>
> Chad