Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education

March 1999

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"Y2K and the Search for Scapegoats -- Part 2"

By: Tom Nadeau - os2headquarters@mindspring.com
Last month I listed some of the bogus scapegoats that uninformed people believe are to blame their Y2K problems. But mainframes, older PC hardware, and foolish store clerks are not the main culprits that OS/2 users must beware. Let's look at a short list of Year2000 error generators that need immediate attention:

1. PC internal clocks. Even new motherboards are typically stuck with a brain-dead century rollover problem: You may have to turn the PC off and then on immediately after 12:01 AM on January 1, 2000, in order to inform the BIOS that the clock is off by 100 years. <sigh> This will correct the problem if you have a recent motherboard BIOS. You can go to the IBM Year2000 website (http://www.ibm.com/ibm/year2000/pcs/assess.html) and download the "PC Evaluation Tool" to verify this for yourself.

2. The Operating System. This seems to baffle many people. Just because the hardware is Y2K-ready, that does not mean that the *computer* is Y2K-ready. Users of IBM DOS2000 or PCDOS7 with the Y2K patch are in good shape; users of Linux are in great shape (Unix variants are expected to have a Y2038 problem only). Users of OS/2 can get in shape by using the appropriate Fixpack. (FP6 or higher for Warp4; FP37 or higher for Warp3.) Note t