Mac OS Classic and Daylight Savings Time

Are you still running Mac OS Classic and are dreading manually changing your Mac’s clock for the new Daylight Savings Time? Don’t despair, there is still hope! I’ve found a tool that will allow your Mac OS Classic machine to still properly adjust its clock for the new Daylight Savings Time.

Download the NTP client “Network Time” (http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/Archive/comm/inet/network-time-201.hqx). Decrypt the archive and install the control panel into your Control Panels folder.

If you are using Mac OS 8.5 – 9.22, you need to go the Date & Time control panel and uncheck “Set Daylight Savings Time Automatically”. You should also uncheck “Use a Network Time Server”, as “Network Time” does the same thing.

Open the Network Time control panel and set the various options for your time server and when to set the time. I won’t go into details, as they should be fairly self-explanatory, but I believe you MUST set a valid time server, or Network Time will not apply the proper DST changes. It must sync to a time server to activate the new DST info. You can use time.apple.com if you don’t have another time server to use.

Network Time can not only set your Mac’s clock using NTP time servers, but it can also automatically adjust your Mac’s clock for Daylight Savings Time. What we’ll accomplish here is to modify when Daylight Savings Time begins and ends for your particular time zone.

There is a drop down menu labeled “Time Zone”. Click on the menu and choose “Add/Change Time Zones”. A screen will appear listing various U.S. Time Zones. If your time zone is listed, highlight your respective time zone from the list, making sure you chose the one that ends in “/Daylight Time”, and click the “Modify” button. You are now presented with options to change the starting and ending dates for Daylight Savings Time. Change the starting date to the 2nd Sunday in March, and the ending date to the 1st Sunday in November. The time should remain unchanged at 2:00 AM. Click OK in this window and the previous window. You should be back at the Network Time control panel.

Now one last step (and this is extremely easy to forget, so don’t forget) – click the drop down menu for “Time Zone” and choose your respective time zone (the one you just modified and again, make sure you choose the one that ends in “/Daylight Time”).

If you do not live in the U.S., then you will need to create a new time zone, or modify one of the U.S. time zones to meet your needs. The details are up to your particular area, but you should be able to use the above instructions as a guide.

Once you’ve made the above changes, press the “Set Time” button at the bottom of the window. You can verify that the time was synchronized by looking at the “The time was last set” info next the the button. If the time doesn’t sync, verify you used a valid time server. Again, if you don’t know any time servers, you can use time.apple.com.

Now that you’ve changed the DST starting and ending dates and chosen your time zone from the Time Zone menu, your Mac running Mac OS Classic should automatically adjust its clock properly for the year 2007 and beyond (at least until they change DST again).

Contact Marcel Brown for all things Macintosh