This morning I sat in rush hour traffic with my engine off because The Fore River Bridge opened at 7:30 rather than the scheduled 6:30 AM. When your as useless as I am in the morning, every minute counts, so I thought I’d post some info on how to perform the DST update for bridge operators, sea captains, and other folks that have yet to update their systems.

If your clock is still an hour off because you didn’t get/don’t want the DST patch offered via Microsoft Updates, you know that you can’t just adjust the clock forward an hour and be done with it. Without applying a patch or by adjusting the start and end dates of Daylight Savings Time with this method, you’re going to have to adjust your system clock four times a year to be on the right time.

While Microsoft does provide a large and complete article on how to manually adjust the start and end dates of DST with their time zone editing tool, TZEdit, I doubt that normal folks will be able to quickly extract the information that they need from it. For those foks, I thought I’d provide a simplified version of the instructions.

Simplified DST Update Instructions

1. Download and run Microsoft’s tzedit Tool which will extract the TZEdit.exe and the TZedit help file. By default it will try to extract them to C:\Program Files\TZEdit\, but you can extract it to wherever you want.
2. Run TZEdit by double-clicking TZEdit.exe
3. Select your time Zone from the list and click Edit.
4. Set the Start Day to the Second Sunday in March at 2:00 AM.
5. Set the Last Day as the First Sunday of November at 2:00 AM.
6. Click Ok and then Close to save the changes and exit the program.
7. Open the System Control panel (Start / Settings / Control Panel) and double-click Date/Time.
8. Select the Time Zone tab.
9. Select a DIFFERENT time zone than you’re currently in and click Apply.
10. Click your real time zone and click OK.

Your system should now show the correct time.

Posted in Geeky