Have tested some items around the house
Have an 8 year old VCR. You can set time and day of week, but it does not know about year. Therefore I expect it will show Saturday on Jan 1/2000. Same with my 15 year old computerized termostat that has a programmable temperature setback for different days of the week. Microwave oven? same thing. The key concept to watch for is if an imbedded device includes year in it's date setting. Cars? both are ten years old - don't know if there may be a problem.
Even tried a 10 year old Radio Shack Hex calculator that has a built in timer and calendar. The calendar function correctly shows the right day of week for January 1/2000, and Feb 29/2000.
One of two computers at home has a non-compliant BIOS. Looks like the solution for that is a motherboard replacement. It is a P75 and is getting long in the tooth anyways.
Did an experiment using an unused 200 MB hard drive. Hooked it up to my Windows NT machine (which is y2k compliant) as the only drive, installed WinNT 4.0, and my Intuit apps, and ran several tests where the time passed from Dec 31/1999 to Jan 1/2000 and from Feb 28/2000 to Feb 29/2000 both powered up and shutdown. Everything worked just fine - reports spanning 1998 to 2000, etc. Not a totally complete test, but enough to show me that the important things do work.
There is a lot to do even on a home PC. Running explorer, and listing all the EXE and DLL files shows hundreds of files. And then there is data. To be assured that a system is y2k compliant would theoretically require testing of all the executable components, and examining all the data files. Will try to test items I feel may be vulnerable or that I rely on, but will not likely have time to do exhaustive testing of everything.
My opinion - the sun will rise like it always has before, there will be many minor nuisances, some major ones too. Probably there may be some big catastrophies as well, but the key word here is "probably". I don't think anyone knows just what the probabilites are for each scenario at this time. However, awareness, remediation and testing will shift the probabilities in our favor over time. |
