for weeks i've been having intermittent computer issues, some of which are crashes or hard reboots. i keep getting these little micro-blackouts which are noticeable because the lights flicker as the power fluctuates, and i think there have been even more frequent micro-brownouts.
annoying as all that is- i've lost some work and not a small amount of time over them- maybe the most annoying part of it all has been my computer clock. every time the computer's crashed, it resets my time back to pre-daylight savings time.
i didn't initially notice that my synchronization to DST wasn't happening automatically; i play with the clock so little that when i realized the time hadn't changed on March 8th, i just knocked it forward an hour and forgot about it. but after it reset BACKWARDS an hour on its own a couple times, and i set if forward again manually, i realized that something was wrong. i checked the settings; tried toggling them back and forth, using different time servers. nothing worked except a manual adjustment.
i have XP SP2 on this machine, and have it set to automatically update my clock and to synchronize with daylight savings. why wasn't it working right?!
turns out the rules for when we switch over to DST changed a while back, and the version of XP i'm running doesn't have the patch, so it's working off the old rules. in case anyone else is experiencing the same problem (and i bet a lot of people who don't have system-wide Automatic Updates enabled, and have their computer clocks set to automatically update and synchronize are), here's where you get the fix:
seems like it would be a good idea for programs that are trying to work within a set of rules which are determined by an outside source, and subject to change, to refer to some online data that tells them what the current rule-set is and how to behave. that eliminates the need for any future software updates to address the fix(es).
enabled system-wide Automatic Updates probably fixed this for most people...i've been a bit sloppy with the updates, what with juggling computers and all.
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