Windows Users in Eastern Europe to Get 2011 Time Zone Update in December

Microsoft plans to roll out a 2011 time zone update to users in Eastern Europe at the end of this year, even though changes in daylight saving time will come into effect much sooner.

According to information offered by the Redmond company, the next time zone changes for 2011 will be introduced to Windows in December 2011.

This even though countries such as Ukraine, Belarus, and Armenia have already discontinued daylight saving time, and will make no modifications to local time at the end of October, as they used to do.

However, Windows operating systems in the countries mentioned above will change clock settings in accordance with the old daylight saving time policies.

“Time information in Windows for time zones in Ukraine [(UTC+02:00) Helsinki, Kyiv, Riga, Sofia, Tallinn, Vilnius], Belarus [(UTC+02:00) Minsk], and Armenia [(UTC+04:00) Yerevan] will be incorrect after October 30, 2011,” Microsoft explained.

What will happen is that at the end of this month, Windows platforms in Ukraine, Belarus, and Armenia will automatically move to winter time, even though the markets themselves will remain on summer time.

“According to the current Windows time zone rules, daylight saving time (summer time) is (UTC+3:00) in Belarus and Ukraine and (UTC+5:00) in Armenia. Summer time is scheduled to end on October 30, 2011 and move to winter time, which is (UTC+2:00) in Belarus and Ukraine and (UTC+4:00) in Armenia. According to the latest changes, they will remain on summer time (UTC +3:00) indefinitely and will not "fall back" to winter time,” the software giant said.

At this point in time, there isn’t an update or a workaround that users can apply to resolve this issue. Microsoft also stressed that it will not be offering affected customers a hotfix to deploy until a Time Zone refresh drops.

In this regard, the only solution that users will have is to manually configure their operating systems.

“Users in these time zones should move to the following alternative suggested time zones: (UTC +3:00) Kaliningrad and (UTC +5:00) Tashkent,” the company said.

As already noted, Microsoft will indeed modify the native time zones for Ukraine, Belarus, and Armenia, but only with the upcoming cumulative Windows time update, which is planned for delivery in December 2011.