I did a backup, set the clock to 12-31-99, 11:55:00 and watched. The date rolled over to 00, and various WP and Microsoft applications showed a date of January 1, 2000. Files were saved to the HD with a year date of 00. The win 3.1 file manager read a year date of :0 on these files.
I let the system run for two weeks, and used it from time to time to make overheads, handouts, or handle e-mail. No files were uploaded or downloaded ot out UNIX server, although I did keep using the SLIP connection to run Procomm as a terminal emulator. I'd leave the machine on all day, turn it off on nights and weekends. Normal stuff.
Here's what happened:
1. The system clock "ran" extremely rapidly. After two weeks, the system date was mid-December 2000. The date reported in CMOS and reported by various WP and Microsoft applications was identical. Whatever date the RTC reported, the applications displayed. Files were saved with a 00 year date, but win 3.1 file manager displayed a :0 date. These files were readable, writable, and seemed otherwise normal.
2. After about ten days, the system would not recognize that I had two serial ports. For whatever reason, every system test that I ran reported only one serial port. This was the case with Norton Utilities 7, MSD, and an old WP utility. Nothing else started shutting down, but I figured thatif a serial port went down, anything could be next, maybe trash the hard drive in some strange time-warp way.
3. Once I set the system clock back to the correct 1997 date, both serial ports were recognized, and they worked fine. I have no idea why the clock "ran" so fast in y2k, nor why the system stopped recognizing the second serial port.
This was enough to convince me that even on a simple PC, the y2k problem can cause hardware failures. Fortunately, I was running a word processor to prepare a few handouts and overheads for a history class, not administering the power grid for a three county area.
elmbronze.demon.co.uk
From: Jace <jcrouch@gmi.edu> Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000
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Exerpts from complete discussion
We all expected computers to have the wrong date, but who expected time to start running at the wrong speed? Had anyone in the world predicted some RTCs would suffer time dilation?
"Nobody thought seconds would start happening at the wrong speed."
Basically this is a NEWLY discovered problem (Aug '97), even after two months or so, and folks who have access to large numbers of different systems are still trying to figure out the extent of the problem. A lot of people are worrying about the effect of this on embedded systems that have an RTC.
Most common on 286, 386, 386sx, 486sx machines. Some irregularities noted on 486dx and Pentium machines, but neither widespread nor problematic.
On machine with the RTC problem, the problem occurs before Y2K, but not as often:
- Very little in l997
- More in 1998
- Frequently in 1999
- All the time in 2000
"It is an asynchronous event. It does not happen every time. The test for it has to be run many, many times before seeing it."
"Oooooh! Ouch!!! Not just unexpected, strange & wonderful, but intermittent!"
"The worst: no apparent relation to what you're doing, no apparent relation to what you're looking for, and refuses to be recreated consistently in the lab. So you don't really know whether you have a problem, and you don't really know when it's gone."
"Spread the word around, discretely (we don't want any panic). Perhaps the problem is restricted to relatively old PCs, or at any rate to ones with old RTCs. But perhaps not - a fear is that embedded processors might suffer from the same effect."
COMPLETE DISCUSSION: gmi.edu
Includes tests done by numerous people on wide-range of equipment.
You'll want to print this out. It's quite long. |
