TICKTOCK, READY OR NOT, NEW DAY DAWNS.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Heads up, Oregon. You are about to participate in an almost nationwide government experiment. It involves your sense of when the day starts and ends.

Congress, in an effort to get us all to use less energy, passed a law two years ago adding four weeks to our daylight-saving time regimen. Recognizing that this decision would discombobulate many a computer program, they postponed the start date by two years, giving programmers a good long time for coming up with fixes.

During the past several months companies such as Microsoft and Apple have created software patches to tell computers daylight-saving time starts on the second Sunday in March instead of the first Sunday in April and ends on the first Sunday in November instead of the last Sunday in October.

Newer computers that receive automatic updates when their users log on to the Internet already have the fixes, said Steven Ostrowski, spokesman for the Computing Technology Industry Association. The same is true for the latest generation of digital video recorders and other electronic devices that have a time zone setting. Companies such as Comcast and DirectTV already have updated them, Ostrowski said.

But creating fixes has been a time burden on corporations and institutions, such as universities and hospitals.

"Over the past month and a half, we as an organization have patched 8,500 PCs across all of our regions and 400 Microsoft servers," said Greg Cottriel, systems technologies manager at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene. Those figures represent changes at all PeaceHealth hospitals in the Northwest, he said.

The fixes apply to a whole range of software: e-mail, scheduling programs, radiology and picture archiving, and communications systems, Cottriel said.

Computer interfaces that connect these systems also required the patches, and Cottriel has worked with a team of about 50 people who have spent 200 hours making sure the technology is ready for the early arrival of daylight-saving time at 2 a.m. on Sunday. Several staff members will be on call should any problems arise, he said.

Such fixes have been especially challenging for companies doing business internationally, Ostrowski said. About 70 other nations follow daylight-saving time; but not all agreed to switch to the new hours, and many only made a decision about it late in 2006, he said.

Ordinary people who don't have a retinue of scurrying technicians but who do have new gear have the least to worry about.

Many of the newest generation of home appliances receive regular time updates via radio signal from the world's most reliable clock.

That clock bases its time-keeping on the profoundly consistent vibration of cesium atoms. The property of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the atomic clock as it is known, is accurate to within a second every 70 million years, says Tom O'Brian, chief of time and frequency and the official keeper of the clock.

We need such a clock because we rely increasingly on time-dependent technology, O'Brian said. Global positioning systems, for example, can pinpoint locations using satellites because they measure the time it takes for radio signals traveling at the speed of light to bounce between the GPS units and the satellites. If the clocks aren't synchronized, the GPS will not read the location accurately, O'Brian said.

People with older electronic equipment programmed to adjust to the old daylight-saving time dates, may find themselves having to reset their clocks four times, Ostrowski said. Once on Sunday, then three weeks later when the clock "springs ahead" another hour, again in October when the machine is programmed to fall back and a fourth time in November for the new "fall back" date, Ostrowski said.

Or not. "That might be a reason it's flashing 12, 24 hours a day," he said.

Will all of this hullaballoo over time of day actually make a difference energy-use wise? Dave Prerau thinks so. A former Department of Transportation employee, Prerau did the 1970s-era research that showed daylight-saving time produced an energy savings of about 1 percent.

Shifting the hours of daylight forward by one hour works because people turn on fewer lights and appliances when sunset arrives an hour later, he said. The fact that people are getting up in darkness and must turn on lights then doesn't have as much of an effect, he said.

"Everybody's up at sunset, but a lot of people are sleeping through sunrise," he said.

Prerau, whose research led him to write a book about daylight-saving time, said Congress has a long history of tweaking the clock, dating back to 1918, when it first mandated daylight-saving time as a World War I conservation effort. Highly unpopular, it was discarded the next year, then resurrected for World War II. Congress lifted the mandate after the war in 1945, but so many communities retained it that lawmakers in 1966 required adoption of the time change on a statewide basis. Only Hawaii, Arizona and parts of Alaska have opted out of daylight-saving time.

And about that grand experiment? The U.S. Department of Energy will be studying whether an extra four weeks of daylight time results in energy savings. If it doesn't, Congress may revert to the old seven-month schedule.

And it will be back to the drawing board for the software engineers.

DAYLIGHT-SAVING TRIVIA

From 1945 until the mid-1960s, communities chose whether to adopt daylight-saving time on an individual basis. In one example, this meant that bus riders traveling 35 miles from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, W.V., would have had to change their watches seven times to correctly reflect the time in the communities they passed through. For more on the history of daylight-saving time:

Internet: www.seizethedaylight.com/dst/index.html

Book: "Seize the Daylight" by David Prerau

NEED HELP SPRINGING AHEAD?

Many computer and electronics companies have created Web pages explaining what to do.

Microsoft: www.microsoft.com/downloads

Apple: www.apple.com/support/downloads/daylightsaving timeupdatepanther.html

Cisco: www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk648/tk362 /technologies_tech_note09186a00807ca437.shtml

Palm: www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/dst.html

Dell: support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support /dsn/en/document?docid=29DBF04A96A300D9E040A68 F5B2851A3&c=us&l=en&s=gen

Blackberry: www.blackberry.com/DST2007/patch/index2 .shtml

IBM: www.ibm.com/support/alerts/us/en /daylightsavingstimealert.html

HP: h10072.www1.hp.com/dst/

Novell: www.novell.com/support/search.do?cmd=display KC&docType=kc&externalId=3853518&sliceId=SAL_Public