Checking that your PC is Millennium Compliant

Introduction

The year 2000 poses a number of problems for computer users. Many applications and data files store year values using two digits instead of four e.g 99 instead of 1999. This results in a number of distinct problems.
 
  1. Computers that neglect to update the Century will incorrectly set the date to 1st January 1900 on the 1st January 2000.
  2. Computers that do not recognise the year 2000 as a leap year will set the date to 1st March 2000 on 29th February 2000.
  3. Software applications that use two digits instead of four to store the date will be unable to carry out date comparisons correctly after 1st January 2000.
  4. Dates stored in two digit form in data files will become ambiguous after 1st January 2000.

 

Most computer users could be affected by one or more of these problems. Items one and two above are essentially hardware problems. These can be addressed by the tests described below. Items three and four are NOT addressed by this test.

NOTE: If you have an Apple Machintosh computer then these tests are not applicable. Apple Inc. have produced a statement concerning the compliance of their products including hardware, software and operating systems.

Running the Millennium Tests

The Millennium Compliance test takes approximately five minutes to complete and can be run in either of two ways, from a network file server or from a floppy disk. Please note that this Millennium Compliance test only tests the PCs hardware clock and the BIOS (Basic Input Output System). It does NOT check any of the software running on your PC (including MS-DOS and Windows) and it does NOT check any of your data files which may contain two digit years.

Further Information

Further information is available at the following locations.

Date:    25th January 1999
Author: Brian Gaines