This whole thing is new to me, but apparently there was this law passed in 2005: the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which does a multitude of things to combat growing energy consumption. One of these is a major change to daylight saving time. From the Wikipedia article:
Starting in 2007, clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the current first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November, rather than the last Sunday of October.
This, of course, will affect all sorts of things, including the auto-adjust settings on computers. The interesting thing is, Microsoft has announced that they will not be offering any update to Windows 2000 or below. Windows XP and Vista (and, of course, Server 2003) customers, you’re ok. Fortunately, there are programmers out there that won’t stand for this and have created a patch to fix Win 2000 machines since a whole lot of businesses still haven’t started using XP yet. (Get it here from my box.) If you’re on Me, 98 or below, I have no pity for you and you ought to upgrade anyway.
An interesting effect of the change is that there will be an extra hour of daylight for trick-or-treating on Halloween night.
