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Thursday, June 29, 2006

Storing system time in UTC in Windows XP

A friend of mine came across an article describing how to store the system time as UTC in Windows XP.

This is helpful for me because I have several machines that dual boot between Linux and Windows XP, and one that dual boots between OS X and Windows XP. Linux and OS X like to store the time as UTC, while Windows likes to store your local time (e.g. UTC+10). Most Linux distros provide an easy-ish way of storing local time instead of UTC, allowing you to boot into Windows without experiencing a time warp. However, OS X doesn't (to my knowledge) allow this -- which is probably a good thing.

The magic key is at:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation\RealTimeIsUniversal
It's a DWORD that needs to be set to 1 (I had to create it). Of course, you need to reboot afterwards.

There have been reports of side-effects, but so far it seems OK for me.