Late for an Important Date? Blame Your PC

Boy, am I ever about to give you a great excuse to miss a few appointments! This year daylight saving time has been re-jiggered on the calendar in order to help save energy, but PC and consumer devices don't all know about the change.

That means you could potentially be an hour off for every appointment you have scheduled from March 11 (the new daylight saving time, 2007) through the first Sunday in April (the traditional, often programmed-into-software calendar date).

While the experts are saying we're not gearing up for anything as major as the old Y2K scare, there are concerns. Microsoft is reminding users not to take calendar appointments as the gospel truth during this new/old daylight saving time period.

Since blaming your PC for being late is going to get old real fast, you're probably going to want to get the jump on remedying the situation. Here are some pointers:

1. Remember that it's not just your PC that can be affected. It could be your cell phone, PDA, DVD player, TiVo, digital camera—basically anything that has a date setting. See the manufacturer's web site for device-specific advice.
2. It can also affect the businesses we use, so check and save your bank deposits and payments during this period, especially if there's a fee for missing a deadline.
3. If you're a PC user, software patches (this will supersede the older DST information programmed into your existing operating system and MS applications) and information are available on Microsoft's daylight saving time web site. Microsoft plans to make the patch available as part of its "automatic update" feature. To turn on Automatic Updates visit the PC's Control Panel. If you don't use the feature, you can download the patch manually from Microsoft. Vista users are spared the problem since Vista is so new that it already knows about the change this year.

Here are some other common sense things you should do:

1. Put the time and date of your meeting in the body or header of an email. That way you're not totally dependent on the system calendar or Outlook's automatic date notification. Even after DST issues are gone this is a great suggestion, especially for bicoastal meetings that are always a problem for Outlook.
2. Send a verification of the meeting the day before—always a good idea, too.
3. If you synchronize devices like your cell phone's calendar with your PC, check the devices before and after you synchronize them so you can see whether one device has overridden another and inadvertently messed things up.
4. You might want to keep a printout of calendars during the weeks of this little interlude, especially if you do a lot of synchronizing where data may get overwritten.

As for your other gadgets see the following sites:

BlackBerry

IBM

HP

Palm

Apple (to upgrade the OS)

You can help by getting on your cell phone carrier's case to get some software updates out. They seem to be the missing link.