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Submission details

promote
-10 +12/-22 votes
demote
change vote

Use UTC time.

Submitted by brownbat on May 25, 2009 to Annoyance, Bug, Legacy, Usability

a) Using Local Time means the internal system clock must be changed every time you move time zones or switch to a DST season.

b) Since other OS's overwhelmingly use UTC, dual booters will experience an odd "clock shift" every time they log in, making the clock many hours off in one OS anytime the time has been set in the other.

c) On the other hand, folks have stated valid concerns with switching to a pure UTC model: http://is.gd/D8RG

There was a registry hack to force Windows to shift to UTC time, but it's unstable.

Good would be testing that registry solution to get it working.

Better would be putting an option and a brief discussion of the pros/cons in the Change Date and Time menu. It needn't be too public facing, it could be in an "Advanced Time Controls" pane.

Low

Low

Not fixed

Discussion (4 comments)

jsmith46 wrote on January 19, 2010, 5:02pm

Wow, I'm surprise at the sheer number of demotions this got for doing what Windows should have done from the very beginning. There is no downside to using UTC for the system time except that Windows does not support it (and even when this is fixed previous versions did not support it), and that users who use the BIOS setup utility might wonder why the clock is "wrong" in there. (If they change it to the "right" time, it will mess up the time in Windows).

But since only advanced users are likely to use this in the first place, unless windows makes it the default, that is hardly a worry.

Stranger wrote on January 22, 2010, 7:55pm

No No No.

pajaro wrote on June 2, 2011, 8:05am

jsmith46,

What you say is pointless. What kind of user visits the BIOS regularly? In case they do, what kind of user changes stuff there to his liking, instead of researching first what they are doing? And even in the case they do, it is really easy to realize that you shouldn't have touched the time once you get into windows, and Windows will fix automatically anyway.

You have to be insane to give preference to your computer clock over of the rest of the world's clocks... wait! Did this happen to you?

songandsilence wrote on June 11, 2011, 11:22am

Wait, W-T-F?

I'm also surprised of the number of demotions this has. Why not use UTC? Almost every other OS does it, so it would make dual booting with ANY OS easier. Not everyone dual boots different versions of Windows. Some people dual boot Windows and Linux, or Windows and Macs. These are the people that usually have to reset their clock every time they switch.

Also, what kind of user visits the BIOS? The kind of users that actually care about the way their computers run. I visit mine all the time. However, for many people, resetting the clock via OS or BIOS can be a hassle.

And what kinds of users "change stuff there to his/her liking"? I fix computers for a living. Maybe I'll send you my last month's work logs, and you can see the hundred or so people who "changed something to their liking", and hosed their Windows install.

One more thing on that. Windows actually FIXING anything doesn't really happen a whole lot, or the computer repair industry would be a heck of a lot smaller.

And "to give preference to your computer clock over of the rest of the world's clocks"? Last time I checked, switching to UTC kept your clock in sync with the rest of the world's clocks, at least the ones that actually are meant for keeping the correct time.

Proper implementation is as follows:

Issuing an update which includes basic GeoIP abilities to pinpoint where the user is by their IP address. This is relatively simple to do.
Use the GeoIP service to sync the user with the nearest time server, perhaps one of the world's many atomic clocks. This is only slightly more advanced than issuing a ping.
Let Windows change the clock accordingly, even if it's only of by so much as half a second.

Why can't we do this? It's blazingly simple, and FUD like yours is what keeps good ideas like this out of Windows.

Besides, UTC will make the user's clock more accurate. All clocks, not matter the quality, suffer time decay (that is, losing a few seconds here and there). Using UTC with a time server such as an atomic clock helps eliminate time decay, facilitates more accurate DST (that's Daylight Savings Time, for those of you who don't know) changes. Making UTC the default would relieve not only these problems, and quite a few more.



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