File times changing - Daylight Saving???

Hi all,

I've had a look around and I found some posts which talk about the daylight saving problem but I'm not sure what that is. Here in Australia, Tassie usually goes back before the rest of the states but this year we all went back together. Now, don't know whether that has anything to do with what people are talking about but it isn't what I'm talking about.

My problem is that some of the files have changed their time stamp by an hour and I don't know why they didn't all or why they just didn't stay the same. I thought at first that perhaps I'd forgotten to change my camera to daylight saving and maybe I did. However, that shouldn't mean that only some groups of photos change time and others don't.

The pictures are all ones which I took before we changed back but I can't remember which I loaded to the computer today and which I loaded before we changed back (ie - last week some time or earlier they would have been loaded.)

Bit annoying - I was fishing out some pictures to put on the internet for friends and trying to use the time stamp to locate them among the many photos there. And of course, with the times being wrong, it wasn't quite as easy. Yes, I used thumbnails, but quite a few of the pictures are very similar at that size so time would have been really useful. That's how I noticed the problem of the time stamp changing for some of the files.

So why does this happen and can I do something about it? It's a bit of a nuisance at times.

Thanks all!

 

Any clues anyone?

 

I'm in Australia - does it matter which I use?

Also, as far as I recall, when I installed 2000 on this machine, I had an option for it to update the time off the internet and selected that. Does that make any difference?

I've had this problem before at an educational institute I was at - the server that our student drives were on was running an hour different due to Daylight Saving (no 's' people! ) and I would often find that my file times changed.

I don't really understand what happens and why.

 

Hi, chookers -

The first thing that you should do is make sure that your Daylight Saving Time settings are correct. If you're running Windows 2000, Windows Update doesn't update Windows 2000 anymore save for security updates/patches.

However, you can get a utility to do this from IntelliAdmin:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/DaylightSavingNotice.asp?File=DaylightSavingFix.exe

Download it and run it.

Then, if you don't have an NTP client, you can get one - I've used Dimension 4 for years:
http://www.thinkman.com/dimension4/

It is free for personal use. It has a list of time servers; pick one that is as close to you as possible. If you can't find one on the list, most universities have a public stratum 2 or 3 NTP server "somewhere", though tracking it down can be a chore.

But, I did a quick Google search for "Australia NTP server", and this link looks promising:

http://info.connect.com.au/docs/ntp/

They have a list of public stratum 2 and 3 NTP servers that they maintain - you can add them to Dimension 4 if the Australian time servers on its list aren't suitable and theirs are.

If you choose to use Dimension 4, or another third-party NTP client, you should disable the Windows Time service: My Computer-> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Services -> Windows Time. Set the Startup type to disabled, and stop it if it is running.

That should take care of any DST-related computer time issues that you are experiencing, and ensure that the time on your computer is reasonably accurate.

If the problem arises again, post a message detailing the camera make/model and the software that you use with it and its version, and we can dig deeper into the problem.

Fixing the DST settings under Windows 2000 will probably prevent this from happening again unless you have software that saves the DST information somewhere in its own data files and refers to that information instead of using the operating system-supplied values when making time calculations - Outlook does this for recurring appointments, for example:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931667

So, updating the operating system DST information doesn't completely fix the DST issues for people that use Exchange and/or Outlook.

If you need a way to reset the date/time stamps in bulk, I highly recommend Scooter Software's Beyond Compare:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/

It has a free trial, and is one of a few select programs that I consider to be "must have".


Regards,

dj