I've lost a day - clock updated incorrectly!

Hi all

my computer has just automatically adjusted to come off daylight saving time - a day early

I checked to see what it thought "yesterday" was with a file I saved yesterday. Correctly, it said 24th...

...then at 3AM up came the dialogue to let me know the PC had automatically adjusted to lose an hour, would I check the settings. Puzzled I did so, to find the clock showing 2AM plus a minute or two... But the date had changed to the 26th!

I wish I knew what date it thought the period between midnight and 3AM yesterday was.

Idiot that I am, I adjusted the clock to correct it before poking around further. I was worried about creating files with future dates...

But I've just now tried file finder, looking for *.* limiting the dates to the 25th - and there's nothing showing before 3AM for the 25th. Or, indeed, after "now" for the 25th. But, there are lots of files (temporary internet files etc) showing 26th... all the ones which should have shown 25th.

So (unless I've lost it completely ) the PC really did skip a day?

Time zone etc was set up correctly. And, not really believing my sanity, I've just woken up someone else to give me a quick "reality check" on this one.

It really looks as if the date double-incremented from the 24th to the 26th at midnight.

Any ideas, please?

Best Wishes, HJ

 

Hi Hugh,
Are you experiencing problems from this mystery ?
Does the PC work OK ? If so, I would just forget it.
Could be just a disk misread/update during eg a thunderstorm.
Or a battery weakness - do you have a UPS ?
regards

 

Hi merlin

again, thanks for taking the trouble to reply. You are kind.

I've cleared up the mess now - not so much due to the date/time stamps for the files being wrong; more tedious were things like my AV updated and built in an incorrect future date into its update log, so the sequencing messed up.

Several similar hassles, things which use file dates to see whether they need to refresh. Thankfully I wasn't using C or anything like that, with my prehistoric C the "make" (source>object>exe) works out what to do based upon whether files are earlier or later...

The main worry was that I started to doubt my sanity! - and it became really important to ascertain that the date had been correctly set on the 24th - had that been wrong I would have been up the creek, work-wise (occasional reality-check : one of the non-optional extras which ships with Windows).

I did as much detective work as I could, and it really does look as if the date double-incremented exactly at midnight. No flat battery, no power glitch, nothing causal that I have been able to identify. I will double check the battery next time PC is stripped down - soon, it needs hoovering. No UPS - yet - I got one but it's unreliable! (pesky thing, will get it fixed when I can) - but the PSU in this dinosaur is built like a tank, and there's plently of spike supression and the like, I can tolerate outages of up to 600ms.

A few other things seem to have happened probably at the same time - some folder views changed, some Start Menu items lost the icons which they had been assigned, I lost the power management and had to reapply it.

And, I did have an odd and nasty crash a couple of days ago - froze, couldn't CtrlAltDel, had to drop the power; went through the obligatory scandisks ( C:,E:,L: had had files open) then Windows started loading but stalled at a text screen saying "Windows Protection Error. You Need To Restart Your Computer." - new one on me. So I did, and things went back to normal. I've rebooted many times since, without anything untoward.

I posted wondering if it was some W98 bug, or maybe something like the 9/9/1999 thing. But as no-one else is having trouble, the event is now consigned to the "strange but true" department - unless anyone comes up with anything else.

very best wishes, HJ

new year's resolution: discover meaning of the term "précis "