Y2K: Ok, I give up Rich, what do these initials stand for? Well, if you don't know by now you evidently are a mushroom.<G> The Year 2000 (K) is coming up much sooner than you think.

I was introduced to my first real time Y2K issue when I tried to use my Visa card to buy some airline tickets and American Airlines ticket people had my Visa with an 04/00 expiration date rejected. So they solved the problem by using 09/99 instead. Now this scares me. If a huge corporation such as AA is not up to date then what do we have to look forward to next year? By the time you read this, they might have it corrected but you never know.

For your PC, there are a couple of gotcha's to consider. One is the possibility that your existing PCs BIOS clock will not roll over to 01/01/2000 at the stroke of midnight next year. The other is that your favorite stock tracking or financial program will completely go bonkers with any dates that you input that will extend over the new millennium.

First the problem with your computers BIOS can be tested right now. There are several companies on the WWW that advertise Y2K check programs. One being http://www.rightime.com who have a series of programs to test your computers Y2K compliance. The program called TEST2000.EXE is placed on a system bootable diskette and executed

CAUTION: SETTING YOUR SYSTEM DATE FORWARD AND THEN EXECUTING SOME SOFTWARE COULD POSSIBLY CAUSE YOU SEVERE PROBLEMS. MANY SOFTWARE PROGRAMS KEEP DATE SPECIFIC INFORMATION IN THEIR CONFIGURATION FILES, SETTING THE SYSTEM DATE AHEAD, ENTERING DATA AND THEN RE-BOOTING TO THE CORRECT SYSTEM DATE COULD MAKE THESE PROGRAMS INOPERABLE OR TRASH YOUR DATA.

This warning is to get your attention to the problems that could be created by setting your system date into the future and executing some date specific programs. Of course a complete system backup must be done prior to any testing of applications software and future dates.

The TEST2000.EXE program can be run safely by booting from the A drive and following the directions. Please do not run this from your C drive or try it from the DOS prompt in Windows 3.X or Windows 95. This is what the output of the program looks like when run on a computer that IS Y2K compliant.

The file named TEST2000.TXT is created in the root directory of your floppy that has the results of the TEST2000.EXE program.

: 06-19-1998 Test2000 Tran 07:08:05.47
: BIOS year rolls 1999 to 2000; Transition test PASSED. Test2000.Exe v2.23a
: 02-29-2000 07:08:05 reboots to 02-29-2000 07:09:20; Reboot test PASSED.

Here is the results of a failed TEST2000.EXE test.

: 06-03-1998 Test2000 08:47:00.46
: BIOS year rolls 1999 to 1900; Transition test FAILED, but Y2KPCPro can correct the failure. Test2000.Exe v2.23a
: 02-29-2000 08:47:00 reboots to 02-29-2000 08:47:50; Reboot test PASSED.

What this proved was that the BIOS did not roll over to the year 2000 properly. After setting the date to Feb 29 2000, it did reboot and keep the date properly. This means that the BIOS can either be upgraded or you can purchase the program Y2KPCPro from the Rightime people.

Personally I would opt for a bios upgrade, even though a software program would correct the problem. I am much more happier with a firmware upgrade.

All the problems with the Y2K situation were created to save 2 bytes of data for every date field in computers. On a PC, this is not that big a deal but on the mainframe computers designed back in the 70's and 80s, 2 bytes times 1 trillion records did add a few hundred reels of computer tape to the storage requirements. Insurance companies and others thought it was a cost savings and now we are going to pay for their short sight. Of course who ever thought that some of their programs and computers would survive 20-30 years?. Now we know, some never die..

Quoting from the documentation for the TEST2000.EXE program.

"Most applications get the system date from the operating system, whose software -based calendar is initialized at boot from the BIOS firmware, which gets the date from the CMOS RTC, which is hardware. The CMOS RTC maintains a two-digit year, so the BIOS appends those two digits to a pair of stored century digits to compose the four-digit year that it provides to the operating system. Since the century digits are not maintained by hardware and, even though the digits are set by any system date set command, they are not incremented when the year increments from 99 to 00; the result is that year 1999 will be followed by apparent year 1900. This results in an oddly erroneous system date of 1980-01-04 at the next boot since 1900 is an invalid year to the operating system. Some applications, which take the date from the BIOS rather than the operating system, will receive year 1900 instead of 2000."

CMOS RTC is the Real Time Clock chip on your motherboard that the battery keeps alive for system time.

The TEST2000.EXE program is free and accurate. It preforms two tests, a real time BIOS transition from 1999 to 2000 and a date retention after reboot test.

The bottom line: Now is the time to start thinking about the impact of the Y2K situation on your computer and data. The sooner the better. There are hundreds if not thousands of references to the Y2K problem and solutions on the Internet WWW. This is just one that I found that seems to be easy and safe. This is not to scare you about what will happen next year as the media will start the hysteria soon enough. I predict some really interesting articles on the TV and elsewhere that will cause people to rush to the bank and withdraw funds. I have heard pundits already talking about making sure that you have enough cash money on hand to pay your bills in January of 2000. If, next year, you get a bill from your automobile finance company for 100 years of interest, then don't get excited, they are probably using an older computer or software. <G> BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. Please!

The program described here is available on the web page of the following company.

The RighTime clock company, Inc.
80 Southwest 8th St, STE2180
Miami, Fl 33130
(305) 577-6400 Voice
(305) 577-6401 FAX
http://www.RighTime.com

Rich Schinnell visits different computer related problems on a regular basis in his everyday life as a small business consultant. His Rich's Ramblings have been almost a regular for the Monitor. He is retir ed from the USN and Vitro Corporation and CPCUG but still enjoys helping people with their computer problems via the Help Line. Members may call him in the evening between 6 and 9PM at (301) 949-9292 or email at schin nel@cpcug.org His web page is at http://www.cpcug.org/user/schinnel.

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