DST update for older Windows

I hadn't worried about the change in Daylight Saving Time figuring I could just turn off the auto-DST function of my PC and manually change the time twice a year—really not that big a deal. Last week I tried to run Windows Update (I've always run it manually), but consistently got told by Microsoft that Mac users should go elsewhere for updates, which might have actually been useful if I was using a Mac. Some Googling of that issue turned up no real leads except that it was happening to others and led to the assumption that since Microsoft is no longer officially supporting any Windows version older than XP, the update function was probably just kaput (although I knew I'd used it since the official non-support announcement).

Yesterday, I tried Windows Update again and the site seemed to be working now so whatever was up with it the week before was straightened out. However, there was no update for the DST changes. (Despite their non-support policy, I don't see why Microsoft couldn't at least have included a patch for the new DST standard. It's not like it's changing the OS, per se, just the settings that control when DST kicks in and out.)

So I then started Googling to see if some other enterprising soul had taken the time to develop such a fix. I thought I'd found it with this DST patch from IntelliAdmin. I downloaded the patch, installed it, and then booted up today to find that my system time was an hour behind what it should have been, so it didn't work. I tried removing it and re-installing, but got the same result except that the removal process put the time back an hour further still! It's as if it thought that my PC was on DST without actually springing forward. So I just abandoned that non-solution.

More Googling led me to this MDGx DST patch. I had to scroll down to "Time Zone Updates" and click on the one listed as "Unofficial DST Update for Windows 95/OSR1/OSR2/98/98 SP1/98 SE/ME [68 KB, English]." Note that I'm deliberately NOT leaving the direct link intact here as anyone who is interested should visit the MDGx page and decide for yourself if it's something you want to try. I can only say it worked for me, but I can't make any further claims beyond that simple statement.

How do I know it worked? Well, I could have changed my date/time settings to just before a DST change (either spring or fall) and simply waited. However, that seemed needlessly tedious. Instead I downloaded a tool known as "tzedit" (for "time zone edit," obviously). Supposedly it's a tool that was included in some resource kit for Windows 98 (and no doubt ME) and it's supposed to be on the Windows CD, but I didn't bother to check. I tried to grab the official tzedit from Microsoft, but clicking the tzedit.exe file did absolutely nothing, so I assume that one is just for XP and Vista users. Next I ended up at this this "softshape" tzedit page where there is a zipped older version of the tool available. I unzipped it and that one worked fine, telling me that the various U.S. timezones are now set to begin on the second sunday of March and end on the first sunday of November. That's good enough verification for me.