Timezone woes?

During my hard disk replacement adventure I used the 'repair' option to reinstall Windows XP Professional. This had unintended consequences. A few patches were overwritten by the repair, but Windows Update thinks they're still in place. So a few parts of my operating system are unpatched.

Moreover, Windows 2000, still running on my laptop, doesn't seem to have a patch for the new timezones introduced in 2007. My internal clock flipped back to standard time a week early. Here's how I fixed it.

If you don't know how to run a registry editor, don't try to fix this yourself. Hire me instead. I'm not very good, but I work cheap.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\Central Standard Time (substitute your own time zone in the foregoing). Look at the REG_BINARY named TZI.

If it looks like this:

change it to this:

Now navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. If StandardStart looks like this:

change it to this:

and if DaylightStart looks like this:

change it to this:

Then reboot.

This worked for me; it may not work for you; if you break your machine I'm not responsible.

Jack