2000: The Year of Living Dangerously
Here's how some basic software testing, a little Web surfing, and a close look at your data can prepare you and your PC for the new century.
Hardware: The Clock Stops Here
You may not know it yet, but odds are good that your PC has some kind of millennium bug. According to Greenwich Mean Time, a United Kingdom-based vendor of Y2K utilities, 93 percent of PC BIOSes built before 1996 will not switch over properly from 1999 to 2000. That figure declines to around 11 percent for computers built last year. Still, it's wise for all PC users to check their hardware for Y2K problems--it's fairly easy to do, and in most cases, the solution is painless.
The problem starts with the way your desktop PC tells time--a complex process worthy of a Rube Goldberg cartoon. Every PC's motherboard includes a battery-powered real-time clock (or RTC). Even when the PC is turned off, the RTC continually updates the time and date. But the RTC uses only two-digit years; PCs store the first two digits of a year in a storage space called the century byte.
When you turn on your machine, the BIOS gets the time and the last two digits of the year from the RTC, and the first two digits from the century byte. The BIOS feeds this information to the operating system, which passes the time and date along to most of your applications.
But the RTC doesn't update the century byte. So at midnight on December 31, the RTC will change the year from 99 to 00, but the century byte will be stuck at 19. When you turn your PC on, the BIOS will retrieve the year as 1900.
A Y2K-ready BIOS will recognize this error and deftly update the century byte, substituting '20' for '19'. But a noncompliant BIOS will dutifully pass the year 1900 to your OS. And if you're using DOS, Windows 3.x, or Windows 95, the operating system will change 1900 to 1980--the first year that it's capable of handling. Windows 98 and NT 4.0 are designed to catch the error and automatically change 19 to 20, but the safeguard doesn't always work as planned.
Clock Therapy
When you power up your PC on January 1, 2000, and it welcomes you to 1980, you'll know you have a Y2K hardware problem. But why wait to find out? Test your PC now, and rest easy when the millennium rolls around.
One way to check for compliance is to visit the year 2000 page on your hardware vendor's Web site. For instance, at www.dell.com/year2000, you can enter the make and model of your Dell PC and find out whether it's compliant.
Another option is to check your hardware, using a Y2K utility. We tested 19 utilities and found Tantra Software UK's ClokTest to be the simplest, most effective way to check whether your PC's BIOS can update the century byte. Just copy ClokTest to a bootable floppy and boot your PC with the disk in drive A:. ClokTest will run and give you the results. Download it for free from PC World Online's FileWorld.
Once you know your system has the Y2K bug, you have to cure it. The fix may be as simple as manually changing the system date on the first day of the new year. Boot your PC in DOS mode, type the command date followed by a space and the correct day and year (date 1/1/2000).
But older machines may revert to the wrong date the next time you turn them on. In our tests, no PC built before 1996 was able to retain the year 2000 (see " Back to the Future"). In such cases, the best solution is a BIOS upgrade. You can usually download BIOS upgrades from your PC vendor's or BIOS vendor's Web site. If your BIOS isn't flash upgradable, you may need to install a new BIOS chip. Or you may choose to replace your aging PC with a completely new machine.
Other fixes exist, though some are worse than the disease. You can install a terminate-and-stay-resident program that loads every time you boot, then corrects any inaccurate dates before the BIOS passes them on to the operating system. The TSR solution makes sense only if you look after a fleet of machines--it's easier than testing them all and updating the BIOSes on many of them.
Another option is to use add-in cards that intercept calls to the BIOS and do the same job as TSRs. Like memory-resident programs, these increase the danger of conflicts--in this case with other hardware devices. And of course, you're paying money to fix a problem you might well be able to resolve for free.
