Troubleshooting your home PC

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 1/31/99

Will Jan. 1, 2000, mean disaster for millions of home computer users? Maybe, if the worst fears of millennium bug mavens are realized and the nation's electrical power grid collapses.

Otherwise, it won't be all that big a deal.

Although half of all US households have at least one PC, these machines are mainly used for noncritical tasks like cruising the Internet and playing games. These activities probably won't be disrupted by the Y2K bug, and even if they are, it'll be more of a nuisance than a nightmare.

Still, many people use their home machines for serious work, and even those who don't would just as soon avoid any unpleasantness. So perhaps you ought to 2000-proof your PC.

There are three points of vulnerability in each computer. Some key hardware components can be susceptible to the millennium bug. The operating system -- the software that controls the machine's most basic functions -- must also be considered. Then there are applications -- the programs you actually want to run, like games and word processors.

Start with the hardware. There's a chip called an RTC or real-time clock, which keeps track of the date and time. Every time you start the machine, the clock is read by a program called BIOS -- Basic Input-Output System -- which is permanently stored on a chip and runs during startup. The BIOS passes clock information to your operating system, so it knows the correct time.

On just about every PC made before 1993, the RTC and the BIOS can't handle dates beyond the year 2000. Even many machines produced since then suffer from the bug. When next Jan. 1 rolls around, these machines will think it's 1900.

(Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintoshes have never had this problem. The company plans to tout this fact in a funny TV commercial that'll run during Sunday's Super Bowl telecast.)

One way to test whether your machine is vulnerable is to manually set the clock to 11:59 p.m., Dec. 31, 1999, then see what happens one minute later. Or, download a free test utility from National Software Testing Laboratories at www.nstl.com. If your computer flunks the test, you should be able to resolve the problem by resetting the clock by hand.

Next comes the operating systems, products like Microsoft's MS-DOS and Windows software, or the Apple Macintosh OS. Well, never mind about the Mac. Once again, its operating system will be untroubled. As Apple officials like to say, "At least we knew the century was going to end."

This fact eluded programmers at Microsoft for many a year. MS-DOS and Windows have Y2K problems. Even Windows 98, released just a few months ago, is tainted with the bug. Microsoft says the problems aren't likely to cause serious difficulties, but the company offers a complete listing of known Y2K flaws in its software at www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k.

Finally, there are your application programs to worry about, and owning a Mac won't protect you. For instance, older versions of the financial planning program Quicken are Y2K-deficient on PCs and Macs alike. Intuit Inc., the maker of Quicken, says it'll have free repair patches before the year is out at www.intuit.com.

You'll need to check the Y2K compliance of all your applications. Make an inventory of your software and contact the manufacturer to learn if you've got a problem.