Christine:
You composed and posted a very detailed post but be careful. If the upgrades and patches are not correctly installed, it could cause major operating system problems.
As I've documented in my past posts, virtually all computers will continue to "work" next January, and I have not been able to find <any> computers that will not take a year 2000 date.
If you are like 99% of the home users, you use the computer for the Internet, E-Mail, word-processing and games. These applications are not date sensitive, and will still work next January. If you are using a home finance system such as Quicken or Money, you may decide to upgrade to the newest release (I do every couple of years to get the new features anyway).
As a matter of interest, we get lists of patches regularly for our company's computer operating system in between releases. Whenever we have an odd thing happen with our systems that we can't explain by looking at the application program source code, we get out the book of patches and see if our problem is covered by a patch. Only then do we load the patch. 99% of the patches are for situations or functions that we do not use.
The time (and risk) of loading each patch as received is not justified.
Please believe me that your computers will run next January. I have already made an offer on this thread, that if you have a computer (286 and above) that will not run when you change the date to 01/01/2000, I will buy it from the first person who will send it to me for $1000 (cdn). Send me a PM, and I will give you the address, and will send you the money for the "worthless" computer when we receive the machine.
I am only concerned that many will follow Cristine's procedure, and may not be as successful.
Jim |
