Microsoft Windows

Tips & Tricks

Dual boot gets time zone wrong

When dual booting windows with Linux or BSD on the same machine the other operating systems keep the real time clock (RTC) in UTC while windows likes to keep it in local time. This means that if you set windows to UTC it works fine but if you have a different time zone windows will come up with UTC time but displayed as if you were in a different time zone. This means here in Europe you would have CET/CEST as time zone but you will be off by -1 or -2 hours depending on if you are in summer time or not.

To fix this you can add the following key to your registry to tell Windows that the RTC is in UTC. This is done by adding the following key to the registry:

Navigate to:

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

Then add a new DWORD32 key with the name:

RealTimeIsUniversal

And set it to value = 1