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Possible Daylight-Saving Time Computer Glitches

(WCCO) There is about to be more daylight in the evenings and it's happening earlier than normal. It's all due to a new congressional act to make daylight-saving time to start four weeks early to save on energy.

However, because of this new act, many people will have to mark their calendars to move clocks ahead one hour on March 11 because computers might not do it for you.

For the first time in 20 years, daylight-saving time is changing dates and nobody told some of the older computer systems out there.

"This could have a potential big impact on businesses," said Ron Gabrielson of the Geek Squad.

If you use a computerized appointment book, you'll want to double check that the time gets changed on Sunday, March 11, otherwise you might just miss that important meeting on Monday.

"If you have an older computer, anything from 2005 and older with either XP service pack one or earlier, you need to make sure you get service pack two installed on your computer. Otherwise it's not going to automatically update," said Gabrielson.

Those with an older computer system and those that don't accept automatic updates regularly will want to make the time change manually. First go to the date and time section, change the time by one hour. Then go to the time zone section. Click off the box that says automatically adjust clock for daylight-saving changes.

That's for systems older than XP that won't automatically update, including Windows Millennium, Windows 98 and Windows 2000.

The change is happening in the United States and Canada, but not in most other countries.

That could mean some problems for international travelers. The airlines said they'll work with passengers, but there could be some hiccups that first week after the new time change.

A few other potential problems could be date time-stamps on transactions, e-mails and faxes, programmed TV recordings and pre-set bill payments.

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