To achieve this, Tweed Shire Council, on the New South Wales North Coast and bordering Coolangatta which, as a Queensland city is locked on to Eastern Standard Time, has disabled the Windows daylight saving function in its standard operating environment across the 40 servers and 350 PCs.

"We don't have to go through the costly exercise of patching every machine which would take at least half a day," Armour said, adding the process should take only a few minutes.

And for the Windows time server, Armour can also avoid this patching task.

"We will be applying the patch on that single server, but if we don't have to we will get away without patching; that's the hope," he said, adding he is aware the patch may need to be removed after April 2.

In contrast, Wattyl IT manager Ashok Vanmali has had the Windows patch applied to the company's servers and desktops.