2000: The Year of Living Dangerously

Tick, tick, tick. That's the sound of your PC, counting down to the end of the century. And if you don't deal with your system's year 2000 issues, it could be the sound of a time bomb.

By now, everyone has heard the tales of digital apocalypse. From the mainframes that handle airline reservations to the logic chips that keep the local power plant online, millions of computer systems will be unable to roll over from 1999 to 2000. Nobody knows exactly what will happen when the clock strikes midnight, but estimated costs for fixing the problem range from $600 billion to $4.6 trillion. (In other words, it's a great time to be a Y2K consultant.)

If you think your PC is immune to the so-called millennium bug, think again. Like mainframes and embedded systems, most personal computers will encounter some kind of year 2000 glitch. The problem stems from the way computers have traditionally stored dates since the late 1950s. To save precious memory and storage space, programmers conventionally used only two digits to store the year--for example, 1/15/99 instead of 1/15/1999. That tradition lives on in the real-time clocks inside millions of PCs. When the calendar flips over to 1/1/00, many of those systems will see '00' and turn the clock back to 1900, not forward to 2000.

The problems for PC users range from annoying but trivial to potentially devastating. Here are just some of the things that can go wrong on January 1, 2000:

• You want to track interest payments on a Treasury bill that matures in 30 years. You enter 1/15/30 into your spreadsheet; the program interprets this date as 1930.
  
  
• Your PC produces the wrong system date when you power on. So your e-mail goes out with the wrong date stamp, and your scheduler doesn't notify you of appointments. Because your company files are organized by save date, you lose track of the latest revisions to your documents.
  
  
• Your custom accounting package sends out statements demanding 99 years of interest on bills mailed last week.
  
  

Even if you squash all the millennium bugs in your system, you risk reinfesting your PC when you import noncompliant data files. And if your network isn't Y2K ready, all bets are off.

Fortunately, you can solve most Y2K problems yourself--and for a lot less than $4.6 trillion. We've broken the Y2K problem down into four key areas: hardware (your PC's real-time clock and BIOS); commercial software (operating systems and off-the-shelf applications like Excel); custom applications (code written especially for your business or industry); and exchanging data (items such as networked spreadsheets and databases accessible by groups of users). We tested 19 freeware and commercial packages that claim to diagnose and/or cure your Y2K ills--and found several that really work (see "Software to the Rescue "). We also took a handful of PCs back to the future, advancing their system dates to January 1, 2000, to see exactly what would happen. In the following pages, we'll tell you how to identify, isolate, and defuse your Y2K problems--before they blow up in your face.