Remember the Y2K fiasco a few years back? We were told of doom and gloom as the millennium approached. Everyone was expecting a catastrophic meltdown as computers around the world tried to cope with the rollover from 1999 to 2000. Well we seem to be facing the same sort of scenario all over again, but this time we can blame George Bush.

Some in the IT sector are warning of problems across North America during March and April when Daylight Saving Time kicks in. It’s one more thing to blame on the Bush Administration, why not! Congress decided a while back that instead of moving clocks ahead one hour for DST on the first weekend in April, as we had been doing since George Bush was a Boy Scout, it made sense to start doing it on the second Sunday of March, this year March 11th. It will give us a little more light in the evening.

It all sounds reasonable, but apparently software programmed before 2005 is poised to stick with the old system of springing ahead in April, not March. The problem won’t be limited to computers.  It will affect many devices that store the time and automatically adjust forDST, like some digital watches and clocks and VCR’s. In those instances the result will be a nuisance (adjust the time manually or wait three weeks) rather than something that might throw a wrench in the works.

Cameron Haight, a Gartner Inc. analyst who has been studying the problem says it might force transactions occurring within one hour of midnight to be recorded on the wrong day. Computers might serve up erroneous information about multinational teleconference times and physical-world appointments.  In mid-February the Information Technology Association of America warned, “Organizations could face significant losses if they are not prepared.”

No one seems to know just how big or small a problem we’ll be facing. Dave Thewlis, of CalConnect, a technology standards consortium for calendar and scheduling software, said it is hard to know how widespread the problem will be. Apparently there are hundreds or even thousands of methods of dealing with the time change. Thewlis claims, “How complicated it is to implement the change has to do with the original design, where code is located.”

To add to the potential confusion, there are lots of old computer programs whose original vendors don’t support them anymore, meaning there’s no repair available. Some gadgets, such as VCR clocks, may not have any mechanism to update their software.

While the USA and Canada have agreed to the change in Daylight Saving Time, most of the rest of the world has not. That could really mess up conferencing systems and other applications that run across several countries at once.

Some IT people reassure us, saying that most computers periodically correct their own clocks by synchronizing with GMT. They do that by adding of subtracting hours from the GMT time code, but that is a function of the individual operating system and how the programme was written in the first place.

The normal way to fix glitches is by creating a patch for the original application. Microsoft has created a daylight-saving patch for Windows PCs with the “automatic update” feature. Users with automatic updates turned off should download the patch from Microsoft. New machines running Windows Vista are immune, since Vista was finalized after the 2005 law passed. 

However, computers running anything older than the most recent version of Windows XP, known as Service Pack 2, no longer get this level of tech support. Owners of those PCs should go into the control panel and unclick the setting that tells the machine to automatically change the clock for daylight-saving time. They have to make the change themselves when the moment arrives. (This is a sizable population; Windows 2000 alone was still running 14 per cent of PCs worldwide last year.

For those who store their appointments in Microsoft Outlook or other desktop-based calendar programmes opposed to web-based programmes such as Google Calendar - the situation gets trickier. Patches for calendar programs are available, but appointments entered before a patch was applied might still be registered in standard time rather than daylight time - off by an hour.

Microsoft advises heavy calendar users to go online and download a small program known as “tzmove” - Time Zone Move - that can retrofit all previously booked appointments to the new daylight-saving rules. Other vendors offer similar tools for their systems.

But what will happen if some people download and install the patches, while others don’t.? This reporter plans to make the most of it, by sleeping an extra hour each day and showing up for appointments 1 hour late. After all, it’s George’s fault!