New Toolkits Help You Prepare for Y2K

By now, everyone who watches TV or reads a newspaper must be sick and tired of Year 2000 scare stories. But as the old saw goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and it does make sense to check out your PC before New Year's Day rolls around. As we march closer to the new millennium, the trickle of Y2K-compliance utilities and toolkits is becoming a flood. Two of the latest packages designed for stand-alone PCs--Centennial Pro Lite 2000 ($39.95) and Viasoft's OnMark 2000 Assess ($49.95)--debuted too late to be included in PC World's Get Smart! Control Your Y2K Chaos roundup.

Both packages are relatively inexpensive solutions and take a sensible approach to probing your PC for Y2K compliance, checking the "big three" areas where Y2K problems can fester: the system BIOS, individual applications, and data files. Surprisingly, though, they offered slightly different assessments of my PC's Y2K readiness.

Get Your BIOS in Line

I tested both toolkits on a three-year-old generic PC equipped with a Pentium-233 processor and Windows 98. Both packages installed easily and quickly, without making any changes to the Windows system files or registry. Centennial Pro Lite 2000 comes with a 30-page printed manual; OnMark 2000 Assess's manual is a 146-page Adobe Acrobat file included on the CD-ROM.

Both programs will run BIOS, application, and data tests individually or in a batch. And both took about 10 minutes to run all tests on my PC (your time will vary depending on the applications and data you have).

I started with the BIOS test. From the start, the two programs differed on whether or not my BIOS was Y2K compliant. Several months ago, I downloaded and installed a new BIOS that the motherboard maker said would make my system Y2K compliant. Centennial Pro Lite confirmed that this BIOS was indeed Y2K compliant, but OnMark 2000 said it wasn't and offered to install a small utility in the PC's config.sys file to take care of the problem. (Centennial Pro will do the same if it deems your BIOS to be noncompliant.) Because any driver loaded in the config.sys file takes up system resources--and I trust my motherboard vendor--I decided not to load the driver. As a general rule, the first line of defense for Y2K BIOS problems is to get the latest version for your system directly from the vendor. Unless you have relatively old equipment, you can use software to "flash" update your BIOS.

Both Centennial Pro Lite and OnMark 2000 Assess also test to make sure the Windows date format is set at four digits (2000) instead of two (00). This setting has caused great confusion--not to mention fear and paranoia. Untrue claims that Windows will crash on January 1, 2000, if you haven't set your date format to four digits proliferate on the Internet. In reality, the date setting affects only how dates are displayed on the screen; it has nothing to do with how they're stored internally or how dates are calculated.

Even so, it's not a bad idea to alter this setting. Centennial Pro Lite allows you to make the change automatically by clicking on an icon; OnMark 2000 takes you to the Control Panel settings, where you make the change manually. (If you want to make the change now, simply go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Regional Settings/Date.)