Don't Let Daylight Saving Time Sneak Up on You

I'm always caught off guard when that fateful Sunday rolls around when time either springs ahead or falls back an hour. The hour backward in fall isn't so bad. Although it still sneaks up on me, I don't mind having an extra hour to sleep or just relax. But that Sunday in early spring when I have to get up an hour earlier is a killer.

To make these new dates less of a rude awakening, I wrote a script named GetDLSDates.vbs. By simply double-clicking the script, I get a reminder of when daylight saving time begins and ends in the current year. Without having to change any code, this script will work the same year after year, even given the upcoming changes in daylight saving time. (For information about these changes, see the sidebar "Daylight Saving Time Is Changing in 2007.")

GetDLSDates.vbs uses Windows Management Instrumentation's (WMI's) Win32_TimeZone class to access information about the time zone and daylight saving time properties in a Windows OS. Thus, to understand how the script works, you need to know what several Win32_TimeZone class properties represent. . . .