Pocket PC Summer clock (Daylight Savings Time or DST) in Israel for 2006
On the 30th of March 2006 Israel will be switching to Daylight Savings Time (aka “Summer clock”). For those of you who don’t know, because of various political reasons, the Israeli government keeps shifting the DST entry and exit points each year, which causes a great pain in the back-end for us IT people. You can read Summer clock in Israel for 2006 for a detailed explanation of this problem.
A Hebrew version of this document can be found here: Pocket PC Summer clock in Israel for 2006 – Hebrew.
Some facts
- The list of Time Zones for the PDA is located inside a DLL file. One can extract information out of this file by using (API) system calls.
- The definition of the selected Time Zone is located in the PDA’s registry, and whenever you change a Time Zone, the information is extracted from the DLL and are written to the registry in the following path:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE'Time Value: TimeZoneInformation Type: REG_BINARY
- The decision to implement the Daylight Saving Time (DST) is located in the registry at the following path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE'Software'Microsoft'Clock
What needs to be done
- Obtain a registry editing tool that can deal with REG_BINARY values
Personally, when I’ve checked these settings, I’ve used a tool called PHM Registry Editor v0.70. However I doubt it if you’ll want to use it yourself mostly due to the fact that it cannot be used to import registry files. The changes that are described on this page are too complex to be manually repeated for many devices.
As an alternative I can recommend using a tool called MobileRegistryEditor which can allow you to edit the PDA’s registry while it’s connected to the PC. You will need to modify some settings by using a tool called aeconfig (see instructions within the downloaded file). You can also seek help by reading the creator’s BLOG.
If you happen to know of any good freeware registry editing tool for the PPC please let me know.
- The changes
The required changes are:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE'Software'Microsoft'Clock] "HomeDST"=dword:00000001 "AppInfo"=hex:' 01,00,00,00,80,01,00,00,87,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,3A,01,00,00,69,' 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00 "GMT_OFFSET"=dword:ffffff88 "AppState"=hex:' 11 "TZIndex"=dword:00000004 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE'Time] "TimeZoneInformation"=hex:' 88,FF,FF,FF,49,00,73,00,72,00,61,00,65,00,6C,00,20,00,53,00,74,00,61,00,6E,' 00,64,00,61,00,72,00,64,00,20,00,54,00,69,00,6D,00,65,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,' 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,0A,00,00,00,01,' 00,02,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,49,00,73,00,72,00,61,00,65,00,6C,00,' 20,00,44,00,61,00,79,00,6C,00,69,00,67,00,68,00,74,00,20,00,54,00,69,00,6D,' 00,65,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,' 00,00,00,00,03,00,05,00,05,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,C4,FF,FF,FF
I’m not sure if you must also import the Appinfo and the Appstate values, but it won’t hurt.
After the import you will need to update the PPC’s time settings. Perform a soft reset.
