Origins
The bog of the year 2000, about of which everyone speaks for some time (and who is very a creator of employment) comes from a very simple fact. During the creation of the first computers, the memory was a product which was worth very expensive. The dates were thus stored on only two digits... At the time, that did not pose any problem, year 2000 still appeared very remote. But, due to , the computers and continued to function according to the same principle. This situation brings us to the current problem: with less than two years of the fateful day, million programs is not ready to support year 2000 but also computers, ...
Possible problems
Year 2000 brings various types of errors:
the return behind: January 1 2000, your computer is likely to believe that the date is on January 1, 1900...
the calculation of duration: the subtractions of type 00-80 for example can give 20 (for 2000-1980) or -80 (for 1900-1980)
the processing to be carried out per day are likely to be d�boussol�s: indeed, January 1, 1900 was one Monday whereas on January 1 2000 is one Saturday...
Moreover, year 2000 is
bissextile. Thus 29 days ago in February whereas the year 1900 had only 28 of them...
These problems can generate many disorders: one speaks about several billion
lines code to correct (primarily in All these corrections to be carried out in the urgency
explains the current rise of the trades of data processing.
Control in three stages
All the computers can be concerned
with this problem but there is an effective means to know if its computer is touched or
not.
For Macintosh, the problem is immediately regulated: even oldest (Macintosh 128k) will
function perfectly until 2040. As for most recent, the limit is pushed back into
29240...
For the PC, a control in three stages is necessary:
The BIOS
The majority of marketed for a few years have used BIOS of account the passage to year 2000.
For the older PC, several sites containing the detailed list of BIOS supporting year 2000
are available. One can quote most complete among all: which provides a list of a hundred configurations by indicating the
platform, the version of the BIOS and even the possible correction by one of the tools
that it recommends. However, these small Lastly, for this type of machine, it would be preferable to leave the
computer lit at the time of the passage to year 2000, the transition
being carried out by the operating system and not by the BIOS.
The operating system
After the problem of the finished BIOS, comes then
that from the operating system.
The recent operating systems manage all the passage to year 2000. For memory, one can
quote that MS-CDos, Windows 3 and can function until 2108. For , the limit is
pushed back until 29601... The Win32 applications (for Windows 95 or NT) can as for them
function until 2099.
Applications
The majority of the recent applications take into account the passage to year
2000. But where resides the problem, it is to know if a preliminary backup will be
reusable, once this mark crossed. For that, there is only one solution, there is necessary
to test with individually because each application has a different
reaction...
These various tests are of primary importance if you have a rather old computer.Your computer could:
games demo ?
Best view in 800x600 with Explorer 4.0
visitors since December 21, 1998