Victor -
These UK guys have been very successful at selling themselves as Y2K gurus but technically this is empty fear-mongering to generate revenues for their Y2K 'fix' services.
The RTC hardware in virtually every PC made conforms to the original PC RTC spec which calls for a century 'byte' which is stored in non-volatile RAM on the clock while the lower 2 digits are maintained by the clock itself.
There are 2 possible conditions for a computer as it goes through the Y2K transition - 1) it is turned on and running or 2) it is turned off.
If it is turned on and running, then both the BIOS and OS can potentially take action. All of the Microsoft OS variants have taken the same approach to this problem - they monitor the RTC and as the Y2K transition approaches (i.e. within minutes of the transition), they begin to execute code on each RTC interrupt which watches for the actual transition. This imposes a slight burden on the system (about a 5% load) for those few minutes. At the particular clock tick which crosses the century mark, the century byte is updated.
There is no application code which runs at a higher priority than the RTC interrupt code, so there is no possibility that a 'well behaved' application will get a bad date, even if it goes directly to the RTC and not to BIOS for the date.
It is possible to write a program that intentionally goes around this mechanism but it requires that the program access the RTC directly and run at a higher priority than the RTC, and also that it runs exactly at the moment that the clock ticks over. So one can create a 'test' that shows the clock can be read incorrectly but it is hard to imagine a real-world application which would do so, even a poorly written one.
All of the BIOS manufacturers have put into place code which checks the date on power-up. This code makes the assumption that dates earlier than January 1, 1950 are really post-year 2000 dates, since there were no personal computers earlier than 1950, and sets the RTC century byte accordingly. Just in case one has an older BIOS, the MSFT OS also checks for this condition on startup.
I am reasonably sure that anyone using a mainstream system running a current BIOS or any version of NT3.51 or NT4, or Win95 or Win98 will be fine if they have patched their OS or if they do so any time next year. |
