> > they had lived in Chile and bought the laptop involved there was
> > probably relevant, even though the various time zone settings had been
> > NZ adjusted. Deep and mysterious can be the ways of the Gates.

> How hard can it be to adjust for a time zone?  ;-)

Excessively, for whatever reason.
IF this was the cause then it was embedded deeper within the psyche of
the machine than was accessible by twiddling the supplied knobs. I
imagine a requisite registry hack was available for the cognoscenti.
Becoming cognoscent is the trick.

I have a recently acquired netbook, bought in Shenzhen after my trusty
but old HP decided to become untrustable enroute.
It has the Chinese version of Windows 7.
I had hoped that the low cost Windows 8 upgrade available via the
internet (offer expires shortly) would allow it to learn to speak
English. Alas, even if I provide it with links obtained from running
the upgrade process on an English speaking PC, it answers to a deeper
magic and still talks Chinese.

Some years ago I did manage to persuade a German speaking laptop (also
HP) bought in Vienna to speak in English. In that case a NZ sourced XP
Professional full install accepted the German COA (to my delight)
after I had decided that the German version was going to have to be
discarded. Such a path MAY work with the Sinophile netbook using a
retail Anglophile Windows 8 source and the Chinese COA. TBD.

The time in Chile is currently a whole 8 hours ahead of me, but yesterday.

Pity those who live in non-coastal China. While the whole country
notionally marches to the beat of the Beijing time zone, those further
West maintain unofficial local times so that they can see the sun rise
and go to work at rational times.*  Presumably they have to set their
Windows time zones to locations in India or elsewhere that match their
local time aspirations, and hope that the deeper magic that insists
that a PC in Auckland is actually in Valparaiso, does not also insist
that they are in Beijing ( ... / Qingdao / Ningbo / Macau / ... )..


 Russell McMahon

* One consequence of the unified countrywide time zone for unwary
travellers is that if you book an airline flight at say 8am you find
that you have to get up at about 2am local time to catch it. Ask me
how I know :-).
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