Beware the upcoming US Daylight Savings Time change

You should already be aware that this year the USA is instituting a change of the Daylight Savings Time switch date. As I blogged before, this has implications on IT and computers in general.

A little background:

As a result of the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed by the U.S. Congress in August 2005, beginning this year Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the US and Canada will spring forward earlier. The revised DST schedule will start three weeks earlier on the second Sunday in March (March 11, 2007) and end one week later on the first Sunday in November (November 4, 2007).
In order to support this change operating system, application software, mobile device and PDA (Palm) updates are required

During the DST period, March 11 to April 1, 2007 and again between October 28 to November 4, 2007, you may notice some of your existing calendar appointments could be off by an hour. In order to address this, Microsoft has created the Microsoft Office Outlook Time Zone Update Tool.

If you use MS-Outlook and have not yet auto-patched, (Vista comes already patched), you should download and apply the patch yourself.

You should also be aware that aplliances (and PDAs) in your house that may have automatic DST change programmed in, will not change properly on the new date unless patched so you may have to change the time yourself in them. For the old VCRs that continually flash "12:00" just leave them be.