Daylight Savings Changes & Your Business
March 2008
By David Estcourt Hughes, Principal, Tripos IT

Watch out on 30th March

The week from 30th March until 6th April 2008 could be a little more difficult than normal.

As you may be aware, this year marks a change in the daylight savings start and finish times in order to bring the states into sync.

Daylight saving will end on the first Sunday in April at 3am this year and begin again at 2am on the first Sunday in October. Normally, this change is quite transparent for many people as they only need to change their clocks.

But this year will be different. If you use Windows on your servers or desktops, there is a significant chance that your operating system will make the change based on the old rule: last Sunday morning in March rather than the first Sunday April. These changes to daylight savings have the potential to cause quite a few headaches - some may remember the issues when the daylight savings dates were changed for the 2004 Olympics in Sydney.

Microsoft, in their wisdom, has developed their software with dependence on regional time zones for applications like Office Outlook and e-mail systems like Exchange server. When these time zones change, the software continues on thinking nothing has changed and the end result is existing Outlook appointments setting themselves an hour out, and e-mails may arrive before they are sent.

Obviously this can cause some confusion, not to mention issues with missed appointments and meetings.

Some patches for effected software like Windows and it's services are now available and are being rolled out as part of Windows Updates, however this does not guarantee that you will not be affected as organisations that do not update their systems are still able to send you inaccurate meeting requests and mistimed e-mails.

For clients who apply Microsoft updates on a regular basis, there should not be an issue. However, last time, the modifications caused more issues than they resolved. For machine connected to a domain, a check on the domain server’s time keeping should resolve the issue as you can manually turn the clock forward on 30th March and then move it back again 6th April to ensure attached workstations are keeping correct time.

If you do not have a domain, you may choose to make these changes on a machine by machine basis.
For the most part, you will not experience any major problems on your systems over this period as long as you do not accept meeting requests through Exchange.

We are looking at other approaches to resolve these issues before they occur and will keep you posted if these simple instructions are seen to be inadequate.

There may be some reactive work required to repair unforeseen problems, however we expect this to be a minor inconvenience. This article should in part serve as a 'heads up' for you over the end of the month as you will almost certainly come across time zone related problems in your day to day dealings with clients and suppliers.

If you do encounter problems, please contact Tripos IT and we will do our utmost to resolve the issue or explain the cause of the problem.

The hot weather and clean machines

At last, the worst of the hot weather seems to be over.

During the ultra hot fortnight, we received a number of calls about machines working erratically. We concluded that, in most cases, the problem machines were operating in environments where the air conditioning was not working as it should.

The modern PC generates a considerable amount of heat which needs to be dissipated as quickly and efficiently as possible. If the inside of the computer case is full of dust and fluff, the machine will work about as well as you would have if you had tried to sleep under a couple of blankets during the heat wave. Without air conditioning, you would have behaved erratically as well.

The internals of your workstation should be cleaned out on a fairly regular basis. The dustier the environment, the more often you should get this done.

On a couple of occasions, we brought machine back to our workshop, or had them delivered there, and we spent time cleaning out the fans and heat sinks to allow the systems to run many degrees cooler. In most cases, this solved the problem. If you are not confident enough to do this yourself, call Tripos IT and arrange for one of our technical people to come and do it for you. Running too hot will eventually damage critical components in the machine. It is well worth the investment.