We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the Year 2000. Come that year, our computers will stop working. Our ISPs will stop working. The power plants supplying them with electricity will stop working. It will be the Unabomber’s dream come true.

As we all know, the Y2K problem stems from one little oversight: Programmers have always acted as if the 20th century would never end--a reasonable assumption if you’re debugging CorelDraw. But as a result, we’re now stuck with countless programs and computers that store the year as a two-digit number. (Some even store the month as a one-digit number, but we know about these because they crash every October.)

And so, in a little more than a year, computers will think it’s 1900, and we don’t know what they’re going to do. The possibilities, however, are frightening. For instance, 2000 will be a presidential election year--which is pretty frightening in itself--but the computers counting ballots may just re-elect McKinley.

Some other predictions for the Year 2000 are just as scary. Among them:

How bad can it get? There are people right now stocking up on canned food, buying cabins in the woods, and learning to hunt bear and neighbor. And these are the programmers hired to solve the problem.

If you use a personal computer, your Y2K problem isn’t as serious as that of the federal government or the large corporations. You’re not in danger of bringing down civilization as we know it. However, failure to address the problem could leave you with an unbootable computer. And when your bank, police force, and local power company all stop working, the last thing you’ll want is an unbootable computer.

That’s why you must take the following steps to make sure your PC is ready for the biggest New Year ’s Eve of your life.

Test your hardware. Set the date on your computer to 12/31/99, the time to 11:59 and wait. After you’ve waited a few minutes, reset the time to 11:59pm, then wait some more. One of two things will happen. Either your computer will fail to roll over properly to the new year, or it will successfully roll over and wipe out all of your date-sensitive data.

Upgrade your BIOS. This all-important chip is supposed to contain the vital code that helps your computer know which century it is. Unfortunately, older BIOSes react to the year 2000 by deciding that it's 1900. They pass that date on to the operating system, which catches the error and decides it's 1980. Luckily, upgrading a modern BIOS is extremely simple. All you need do is download an upgrade from your BIOS manufacturer’s Web site. But you have to do this before the year 2000. Once January 1, 2000 rolls around, your BIOS manufacturer won’t have a working Web site.

Check your data. The most serious Y2K problems are lurking in your files like a communist at a kid’s birthday party. To find these problems, go through every data file you have, looking for two-digit numbers. Every time you find one, assume that it’s a year and add a 19 or 20 to the front of it. If the job gets boring, add additional digits.

Develop good working habits. Once you’ve eliminated all your bad data, you must be ever vigilant in keeping your information pure and clean. From now on, always enter four-digit years when typing in dates. If a program only offers you space for two characters in a year field, type smaller.

Upgrade your software. Software companies are regularly releasing bug fixes, patches, and major upgrades to fix problems related to the century change. For instance, Microsoft has recently announced that all of its millennium-based issues will be solved with its next major operating system revision, Windows 1900.

Get a Y2K analysis program. If all of the above steps seem overwhelming, use a program like Unkept Technologies’ Pricetag 2000 to automate the job. Simply install Pricetag 2000 on your machine and click the Start button. After a three-hour examination of your system, the program will issue a report, recommending that you test your hardware, upgrade your BIOS, check your data, develop good working habits, and upgrade your software. In particular, the program will recommend that you upgrade Pricetag 2000 to its latest version, Pricetag 2010.

If you follow all of these steps, you stand a good chance of having a working computer come the year 2000. Armed with that, you’ll have little else to do to prepare for the new century, save for stocking up on canned food, buying a cabin in the woods, and learning to hunt bear and neighbor.

© Copyright 1998 by Lincoln Spector

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