Starting in March 2007, the standard North American period for Daylight Saving Time is to be from the second Sunday of March (March 11, 2007) to the first Sunday of November (Nov. 4, 2007).

Canadian provinces and territories have announced that this standard will replace their previous practice (from 1987 to 2006, DST was from the first Sunday of April to the last Sunday in October).

Note that for 2007, the time difference between Europe and North America will change for a period of 3 weeks instead of 1 week (2 weeks in March and 1 week in November) and will be in the opposite sense to past experience.

First off, this is NOT the major crisis that has been reported in some media circles. Some have likened it to the big Y2K scare - we all know how that turned out.

Unless you are running the latest version of Windows (Windows Vista), your computer will likely be affected by this this change. In most cases, such as for home users, this affect will be a minor annoyance, and will simply require manually adjusting your computer's time.

To a lesser degree, in some business computing scenarios, where mission critical business applications and/or databases which depend on time are a factor, you, or your IT department is likely already well aware of the new DST implications, and have taken steps to act on them by now - haven't you? :)

At the time Windows XP, 2000, Windows ME, NT, Win98/95 were developed, this change to Daylight Savings Time was not accounted for, so these systems will not recognize the new start and end of Daylight Savings Time on the dates they go into effect. This also applies to older versions of Mac, and other operating systems.

The Options:

For older Windows Operating systems, you can either manually update your computer time on these dates, or update your system to recognize the new Daylight Savings Time dates. For Windows XP users, Microsoft has made a patch available from their web site that corrects these dates. For Windows version prior to Windows XP (2000, ME, NT, 9x), Microsoft no longer supports these systems, and has not offered a free patch or upgrade.

Alternatives:

Aware of the fact that Microsoft provides no free support for Windows users running systems prior to Windows XP, the independent software development community has come to the rescue! Several developers have offered solutions to the new Daylight Savings Time change, and a few have developed simple, free software programs which effectively deal with this change.