Well, I've actually started Y2K remediation on a Windows PC. I'm taking care of my family, started with my sister and her Dell Dimension P90. Here is a report.
1. I downloaded Microsoft's Year 2000 product analyzer. Found eleven products. A few, including Word and Excel were Compliant with Minor Issues. In Microspeak, this means that they aren't Y2K OK but Microsoft is not going to fix them and they don't think that anyone will yell too much. There were seven that were Compliant (prerequisite required). That is Microspeak for 'go get the patch'.
2. I downloaded the patch for Windows 95 (thought that a Y2K compliant operating system might be a good idea). Realized that fixing Internet Explorer would probably mess up AOL. Tried to find a patch for Microsoft Access and found that I would have to go in and rename .dll files to put it in.....
3. Went to the Dell site to check out the hardware level, real time clock BIOS problems. Found a patch. For those of you who are still reading this, it took me ten minutes to fix a problem that your friendly newspaper technology columnist says is a reason to Buy A New PC. Think about that.
4. Backed up everything. Installed new BIOS, for which I had to create a boot disk and get a new version of Winzip - yet another technical pain in the tush.
5. Installed updates to Win 95. Held my breath. Everything still seemed to be working.
6. Showed my sister how to go on-line and get latest updates for both Quicken and Norton Anti-virus.
7. Had my sister request newest version of AOL. I'm hoping that that solves all of the Microsoft browser and Java virtual machine problems. In any event, she has got to rely on AOL to solve the Y2K related problems in the Microsoft browser. Hope they are on top of this.
8. Went to the Web site for Starfish (she uses Sidekick) and got very suspicious when I could find no actual information about Y2K compliance. She probably has to take all of her name/address info and put it into another application. We discussed whether she should try Microsoft Outlook (just can't get away from them) or use the primitive address book software that came with her Palm Pilot.
Hey, and we're not done yet.
How many people are going to do this? How many small businesses are going to do this? How many people even realize that they have to do this?
And - yes - buying a new PC might help a little - but you are still going to have to go through many of these steps.
If we don't clean up our PCs, they may still work on January 1. But we will know for a fact that many pieces of the software are not handling date fields correctly, since we haven't bothered to upgrade the software to Y2K compliant versions. Most of the world is going to take that risk.
However unstable the Windows PC environment is now, I don't think you have to be a genius to predict that it will be more unstable next year. |
