Q. How do I configure Windows Server Core's time zone and international settings?

A. Server Core's GUI-less environment and lack of a Control Panel make some settings difficult to configure. Most OS settings typically configured through a GUI can be configured other ways, such as through a command-line interface, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), or registry modifications. The time zone and international settings are registry settings, but there aren't command-line interfaces to modify them. However, Microsoft provided Server Core Timedate and Intl Control Panel applets for time zone and international configurations.

To launch the applets, use the control applet command, as the following commands show:

control timedate.cpl
control intl.cpl

Figure 1 shows the Timedate applet dialog box.