The “infernal” equinox hasn’t happened yet and already they want us springing forward. What’s up with that?

Thanks to a federal law, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, daylight-saving time will go into effect on the second Sunday in March (this year, March 11), three weeks earlier than the customary first Sunday of April. The return to standard time also is being shifted, from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November (this year, Nov. 4).

Overall, DST will be extended about four weeks, a change that is expected to save as much as 100,000 barrels of oil per day, according to lawmakers who backed the law. Apparently, not everyone agrees, but that’s another story.

Love it or hate it, DST should present few problems for people other than the hassle of roaming room to room resetting tabletop and wall clocks. Automobile clocks can be a minor headache, but they’re not much of a problem, either.

Computers, PDAs, BlackBerry models, smart-phones and other handheld devices, on the other hand, might require software patches to update automatic clocks still geared to switch to daylight-saving in April and standard time in October. Not applying the patch could affect some applications. Reportedly, TiVo already has sent out an automatic software update.

For most of us running nothing more than home PCs or Macs, a simple patch is all that is necessary and many computers will download these automatically. Nothing like the Y2K anxiety in 1999 — which turned out to have been largely blown way out of proportion — should attend the switchover to the new daylight-saving schedule.

Microsoft and Apple corporate Web sites have easy-to-follow guides to downloading updates if your automatic update service hasn’t already done it for you.

According to Microsoft, the changes will apply in the United States and Canada. Depending on various factors, the change could impact business customers located inside and outside North America. Mexico will not make the change, and Microsoft recommends that systems configured to use U.S. time zones (Pacific Time, for instance) will need to update their system configurations to use the altered Mexico time zones.

The DST change may affect automated and technology-reliant products, used by individual consumers, small- to medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, according to Microsoft. Computer systems that may be affected include: Calendar and scheduling applications, current and historical date and time calculations, transaction logging and tariff billing applications.

Microsoft said that, in most cases, changes will be minor, but some users may need to make adjustments manually. In other cases, the company’s Web site states, more substantial efforts may be required. Microsoft recommends technology managers determine what is necessary and specific to their systems.

The Clarion contacted several of the peninsula’s larger entities — governments, utilities and stores — to see how they were handling the change.

The Kenai Peninsula Borough was scheduled to update its computers Saturday because there was little activity to interfere with the process, which was expected to take a matter of hours, said Ben Hanson, network administrator for the borough.

“It’s mostly a babysitting thing,” Hanson said.

Windows patches will be applied for e-mail and calendaring applications (meeting scheduling and the like), he said.

“Our internal systems are pretty much unaffected,” he added.

Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s servers and its roughly 4,200 computers have already been updated, said IT Director Jim White. The update was applied to individual computers remotely from the district headquarters and required nothing more of users than a restart.

“We took care of the change on February 24,” White said. “It was a simple process for our folks. We do a lot of remote management here.”

Nick Erickson, manager of the Kenai Home Depot store, said their computers would be adjusted soon and remotely from corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Ga.

Melissa Carlin, staff journalist for Homer Electric Association, said the change was very easy for the utility and involved no difficulties.