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Setting Your Clocks Ahead

Because so many free hardware diagnostic programs exist, there's no reason to pay for one. We looked at five popular no-cost solutions. Unfortunately, "free" often comes with strings attached.

Frequently, companies that give away software are trying to sell something else. Two of the five programs we looked at, Centurion Year 2000 Test and EZcheck2000, gave failing grades to all four of our test computers--highly dubious results. Not surprisingly, both come from vendors that also sell the "solution": add-in boards or software you probably don't need.

The issue is simple. Every PC has a CMOS chip containing a real-time clock that tracks the time and date even when your PC is turned off. When you power up your system, that date becomes available to your applications through the BIOS--the built-in software that controls the keyboard, monitor, and other functions. Almost no CMOS chip is designed to roll over to 1/1/2000 on its own, and that news is what some hardware diagnostics report--and what their vendors purport to "solve" with an add-in board.

What these programs don't tell you is that if your BIOS is Y2K compliant, a noncompliant CMOS is irrelevant. A properly prepared BIOS, when faced with a CMOS date like 01/01/1900, will tell your software that the date is actually 01/01/2000 and will correct the CMOS as well.

In theory, a noncompliant real-time clock could cause problems with software that reads the date directly from the CMOS, but it's not worth worrying about. We have not identified a single commercial DOS or Windows program that will report the date incorrectly because of an incorrect CMOS century.

Our preferred hardware solution, the OnMark 2000 BIOS Test & Fix, doesn't sell anything. It just reports whether your PC will roll over properly come January 1. If OnMark 2000 tells you that your BIOS isn't compliant, you should update the BIOS (usually a free download from your system vendor's Web site) or simply turn the PC off on New Year's Eve. Changing the date manually the first time you boot in the new year should fix the problem. (See August's Answer Line for more on this.)

Total Solutions

If you use Excel, Quicken, or other programs that contain dates, isolating noncompliant software and data can be harder than identifying a troublesome BIOS. Recent Windows-compatible programs are relatively easy to fix with a visit to the vendor's Web site. Older, DOS-based database programs pose more of a problem. If your company still uses one of those antiques, it's time to replace it.

Above all, though, poorly entered data could wipe out a small business. Consider this possibility: In a company worksheet, a column contains numbers that represent years--98, 99, and so on. Elsewhere on the worksheet, one or more important formulas subtract these years from other years. When values like 99 and 97 are plugged into the formula, the worksheet computes the answer accurately. But year values like 01 produce unsound results. And if you base important business decisions on those numbers, you could find yourself in serious trouble.

That's where Y2K suites--programs that test hardware, software, and data--come in. The six here all cost $60 or less and are designed for laypeople. But no program can go into your data and fix it--you have to do that yourself. The best programs locate and identify potential problems. Check 2000 PC Deluxe and Norton 2000 2.0 alerted us to fixes available for many of our apps and found most of the hot spots lurking in our data files.