Midnight hour the key to avoiding glitches

By Chris Barton

By far the simplest solution to fixing the millennium bug problem in PC hardware is to make sure your PC is not running at midnight on December 31, 1999.

"The majority of problems will occur if the PC is left on at midnight because the time which is kept in memory and read from the RTC [real time clock] will not automatically recognise it's the year 2000," said Computer Fanatics director Devendra Patel.

What will happen in most cases will be that the date reverts to 1900 or 1984 - year zero for PCs. But while this would be bad news if your PC was running at the time, it's not too much of a problem if the PC was turned off. Switch on again in the new millennium and all you have to do is go to Setup (normally by hitting Delete as your PC boots) or the Dos operating system under Windows (use the Date command) and change the date to 2000.

If you do this, in most cases Mr Patel has found, your Bios firmware chip (basic input output system) will hold the new date. In other words it doesn't matter that the RTC (the battery powered clock that keeps time while your computer is off) only presents "00" - your PC's Bios once manually corrected will know that means 2000.

Be warned, however, there are a few Bios chips that don't. If your PC is one of the unlucky few, you will need to get either a Bios upgrade or one of the numerous PC Y2K fixes on the market. These comprise either software patches that correct the century date mismatch or hardware - usually in the form of a replacement Bios and RTC boards.

But Mr Patel says in 95 per cent of cases that's not necessary. His company just fixed "Elsie" - the ANZ Bank's high security Bonus Bonds random number lottery generator which is based on an ancient 286 chip. He said the process was a relatively simple software fix.

The same is true for the Computer Fanatics' vet clinic and hairdressing salon software. In those situations the company found incorporating a simple "date stamp" routine that checked the current date against the one when the software was last used got round most date problems. Another technique, when there were networked PCs, was to synchronise the time on all PCs from the time and date on a single compliant server. That way all PCs on the network would be using the same time regardless of whether their clocks or Bios were faulty.

But Mr Patel does acknowledge that even with hardware fixed, real Y2K problems do lie in off-the-shelf software and archived data - and that finding and fixing such problems is time-consuming and laborious.

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