Ah those Microsoft Vista TV commercials! Wow. Just Wow. But I must be looking in the wrong place - I just don't see much new at all. "Wow" relates to Vista about as much as the Stones "Start Me Up" related to Windows 95. A good, catchy song, but had little to do with Windows except that it had a Start button. But then, I am a computer technie, not a Madison Avenue type. Oh, and Microsoft used a sanitized version of the song - look up the real lyrics. Are they talking about starting a fast car or motorcycle, or ???
Time has bubbled up into the conscious of computer users here in the US again. The last time that time was timely was the much anticipated Millennium Y2K problem that due to a lot of foresight and work by many people turned out to be a very small crisis. But this latest one snuck up on us quietly. I wish I had had the foresight to write this column a week or more ago, but I was placated by Microsoft as were most people. If I had used my knowledge of programming and the internals of systems and programs I would have realized the problem myself but I was lulled into security.
The latest problem, of course, was the change in Daylight Savings Time. Your computer has programmed into it the algorithm (computation) for when DST begins and ends. That changed this year. To properly handle the change, your computer software needs to be updated. If you update Windows, that will fix the actual DST computation. But you may have application software that stored dates in the old way before you loaded the OS fix.
For those of us who follow these things, Microsoft send out a fix in February as part of the normal and never-ending set of fixes and updates to Windows XP. Apparently Windows Vista already contained the fix. For my contracted clients, I just made sure (as I always do) that their PCs were up to date and didn't think much more about the problem.
But that just patched the Operating System itself; there was in fact more of a problem when you look at individual application programs. Some, such as Microsoft Outlook, still had a problem; some programs did not. The difference was how dates and times are stored internally in program data. In the case of Outlook, all of the previously scheduled items in the next three weeks were off by one hour.
It all has to do with the format for storing dates and times. Now you may think that they are stored as humans would store them - yyyyddmm hhmmss. But in fact most programs don't do that; instead they store any date/time combination as the number of seconds which have elapsed from a known starting date. This may see odd, but in fact it is much easier to use and facilitates date/time arithmetic. So dates and times become "differences" and if DST is wrong, the differences are calculated incorrectly.
What to do? Go to the Microsoft website (www.microsoft.com) and enter the term DST into the site search field; the first reference you get is to the MS "Daylight Saving Time Help and Support Center" which will direct you to download the proper fixes if necessary. The fix for Outlook is called tzmove.exe and it will shift those times back to where they belong. Note that this is for big Outlook (with the calendar function) not Outlook Express which is just an email program.
So, if you use a calendar or scheduling program on your PC, look to see if the entries for the next three weeks are correct. If not, you should contact support for that program to get a fix.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)