ztect: I won't comment on Yongzhi's review. Those are his observations, and he's entitled to share them with others.
Regarding the reboot requirements ... there has been discussion in the Y2K area regarding the safety of rebooting just once to test for the 12/31/99 rollover. There are some who believe that a reboot is necessary to test each one of the "sensitive" dates ... like 2/28/00 and even 9/9/99. I'm not in that camp. In my opinion, the real time clock's rollover exposure is midnight of December 31, 1999. If you fix that problem, the others are taken care of. This is all debatable, however, because of the number of different chipsets available.
Regarding my opinion of hardware fixes ... there are a bunch of them available. None of them are "far better" than any others. As long as they work, and are easy to implement, then the only differentiation would be price and ease of use (the user interface). With respect to price, please note that there are several fixes available for free. I haven't tested these, so can't comment on the quality. Basically, there's not much to them. With respect to ease of use ... well, once you've determined you need the fix, you install it. No more user interface needed. So, there really isn't much differentiation.
The real challenge with the Y2K on PCs, as we discussed on the PINC thread, is the application software that runs on the PC. The PC hardware is relatively simple to fix. The software is much more difficult. There are a half a dozen or so PC "fixers" that tackle that issue now, and more on the way. Some succeed to varying degrees, some don't. Some even had the right idea but took the wrong approach towards implementation. That's what happens when inexperienced programmers tackle a major project by developing a quick fix in their garage.
The software fixes are not to the applications software itself. That's darned near impossible. The fixes are to the files and scripts that the applications use. Most of these are user written, or off the shelf models.
The only way to fix the application software itself is to contact the vendor, or install the latest Y2K compliant version. A few of the available "fixit" products assist the user in the "patch" effort. They even provide links to the vendor to download patches.
GTCI's toolette, from what I can tell, is just another hardware fix. No great shakes. My opinion only, of course.
Regards,
TED |
