[colug-432] Knoppix: Time Zone and BIOS clocks

[Vince's Transformer]

I've messed with bios settings a good bit over the years and have never
seen one with a time zone value, just a single clock.  I think of them as hardware clocks that you can set in the BIOS, rather than BIOS clocks.
Since the BIOS is software and the clock is actually hardware.

My machines are all double boot with windows and linux on them.
Since Linux ( and Vince ) likes to leave the hardware clock at UTC ( GMT ) and then set a software offset for your particular time zone I use UTC as my bios time setting ( I'm not saying Linux can't deal clocks not at UTC  it can).  


Early days setting the hardware clock to UTC  would cause windoz some consternation.  Some time back I found
a windoz registry update that tells windows to leave the hardware clock set at UTC, and thus use it exactly as Linux does.
I have both set and unset registry code on my web server 


With windoz using the UTC setting then both OSs use network time protocol (NTP) to set the hardware clock to UTC.  No more scrapping.


see http://planetvince.com/tools/windutc.php  
I've only tested it on Vista and Windows 7 but my reading leads me to understand it works on older releases.


*** Note should you install these windoz updates Windows seems to get really confused if you have the hardware clock set to local time.  
Windows does its NTP  updates strange times
and if it finds the clock set to local time, would probably take days for it to stabilize.


Either just before or after you apply the registry updates change the hardware clock to UTC via BIOS.  I'm sure other procedures will work also.  I've not had any issues with it but a friend working on a computer I setup for him and added the use UTC update had issues until he set the hardware clock to UTC.  it kept bouncing the time around or so he said.

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Vince