
Why does Windows keep your BIOS clock on local time? - signa11
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040902-00/?p=37983
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tinus_hn
This post is an example of Raymond’s typical apologetics. Find a stupid
problem and he’ll come up with a bunch of excuses.

The reason it’s the way it is is because that’s the way it has always been,
change is difficult so there has to be a reason for it. Keeping local time in
the bios is stupid but that’s the way it has always been done.

Windows 10 can actually do this right but you need to set it in the registry,
they never bothered putting a switch in the control panel. Now they should
change the default.

The setting is:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
REG_DWORD:RealTimeIsUniversal:1

~~~
Delk
I can kind of understand what he says about adjusting the time from the BIOS
settings, but most people doing _anything_ with BIOS/EFI settings nowadays are
technically involved enough that understanding UTC shouldn't be a dealbreaker.

The dual-booting arguments are weird because if anything, dual-booting becomes
potentially _more_ complex with the RTC set to local time. Both operating
systems might e.g. separately adjust the local-time RTC for daylight savings
since they can't know the other OS has already done that.

If he had just said "well, this made sense with the positions from which
Microsoft was doing things back in the time and we never got around to
changing it", that'd actually make more sense than making kind of plausible
but almost certainly irrelevant arguments for still doing it the same way.

