Daylight Savings: Y2K All Over Again?

March 5, 2007 — -- It seemed like a good idea at the time.

In 2005, as the price of gasoline spiked, Congress quietly passed a measure to begin daylight-saving time three weeks early this year. If the sun stays up later, went the logic, U.S. energy consumption would go down.

The problem is that while they told us all of the switch, they didn't tell our computers or our cell phones -- or any of the zillion other digital clock-driven devices that have come into our lives since Congress last messed with the calendar in 1986.

"Even little stones that are thrown in a pond have a lot of unintended ripples, and this is certainly one of them," said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., who has kept tabs on all the updates and software patches that companies are now making.

"Planes won't fall from the sky," he said, "but there are going to be a lot of little, minor annoyances that make people's days a little more hectic, a little more painful."

Daylight-saving time would ordinarily have begun on the first Sunday in April. Instead, it'll begin this weekend.

If you're like most of us, you'll get up Sunday morning and reset the clock in the kitchen, and the one on the microwave, and the old clock in the living room, and so on and so forth.

But what about your computer? Or the clock in your cell phone? Or let's say there's a stock you're hoping to buy online just before the market closes Monday.

Here are some things of which computer specialists say you ought to be mindful:

Computers: If you have a new one, running, say, Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2, or Apple's OS X, you'll likely be fine. Newer machines either know that daylight-saving time has moved up, or software patches were sent out online.

If you have an older operating system, though, you'll have to change the computer's clock on your own, and you may have to un-change it when it thinks the clock is supposed to spring forward on April 1. No big deal, but there are tens of millions of older machines out there.