I'm a recent convert to Sparky, and overall, I like what I'm seeing. However, I found it very annoying that, upon booting up, the system seems to pick a time zone at random, forcing me to guess at each login what time zone to select to make the clock display the correct time (I'm in U. S. central time, BTW). So what I did on both computers on which I've installed Sparky (4.0 release candidate 64-bit LXDE edition, BTW) is install NTP (available in the repos as "ntp"), and VOILA! The time stays consistent and allows me to set Chicago (about 4 or 5 hours up I-55 from me) as my time zone and always displays the correct time. 8)
So therefore, I would strongly recommend pre-installation of NTP into Sparky.