This one kind of irked me that Microsoft didn't release a patch for anything less than XP SP2 even though 2000 is still actively supported.  However, without searching the Internet, I found out how to "teach" Windows the new DST rules without that silly patch.

It's just three registry entries.

Start > run > regedit
Navigate to HK_LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Microsoft > Windows NT > TimeZoneInformation > Eastern Standard Time (or this can be whichever zone you're in)

In there, double-click on the Binary entry named "TZI".  In there, you'll notice that there's part that has this information: .. 0a 00 00 00 05 00 02 .. and .. 04 00 00 00 01 00 02 ..

Those are the old rules: 10th month (that's an 'a' in hex), 5th sunday, at hour 2 (of 24) and 4th month, 1st sunday at hour 2.  Just change those values to read 0b 00 00 00 01 00 02 and 03 00 00 00 02 00 02.

All you need to do is change the 'a' to a 'b', and that is done by putting the cursor to the left of the 0a set and pressing the delete key once (this will get rid of both characters), and enter in '0b', then change the week from 05 to 01.  Same goes for the second half.

Not done yet though.  Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > System > CurrentControlSet > Control > TimeZoneInformation and there's two keys: "StandardStart" and "DaylightStart".  Those need to be modified the same as above.  Once you're done, reboot and you're updated.


Hope this helps some people out there.  I knew there had to be a way to do it.  Since it's just a simple registry fix, I don't know why Microsoft didn't release some patch for it.  It's not like half the OS needed to be rewritten or anything.  They did, however, tell people using 2000 to go download a tool from them called TZEdit, which is supposed to do the same thing, but it didn't work for me. Modifying the registry without knowing what I was doing at first worked. *shrug* Go figure.

Nice post and screen name. I love it. Thanks for the help, Im sure someone will benefit from this.