Greetings faithful readers! Well the grandkids are back in school and things have settled down to the normal fall routine, which includes Granddad the couch potato watching football games while Grandma runs the grandkids to dance or gymnastics – oh and don’t forget the football game. So naturally just when you thought you could relax a little in the evening in front of your computer you start hearing about this Year 2000 Compliance problem. Just exactly what is it and how does it affect the computer homeowner. We will address this potentially critical issue over the next two months and hopefully answer most of your questions.

The cause of the Year 2000 problem is simple: many computer software programs store only the last two digits of the four-digit year. The century portion of the year is assumed to be "19." When the year 2000 is stored as "00," however, computer applications will continue to assume the century value as "19," incorrectly interpreting the year as 1900.

The news had reports almost daily of the problems large corporations, banks, the Stock Exchange, and other similar organizations will have with the year 2000. Luckily, home computer users are probably better off than the large companies. The PC industry moves a lot faster and has far better support for corrective software and hardware. But the home computer and its software are not immune to the year 2000 bug. Your computer may trip on January 1, 2000, because of a flaw in a clock chip, BIOS, operating system, application, or your data, or any combination of these factors (is your head spinning yet?). Don’t worry if you don’t know what these computer terms mean, any knowledgeable computer store will be able to test your computer for year 2000 compliance.

For your computer to be fully 2000 compliant—to properly recognize and calculate dates after December 31, 1999--every link in the chain must be compliant. If the system clock feeds the wrong date to the BIOS, the BIOS will pass it along to the operating system, which in turn will hand it to any application that asks for it, which in turn will use the wrong date information in spreadsheets and databases and financial programs. Even if the clock chip and BIOS are 2000 compliant, if the OS (operating system – like Windows 95) or an application isn’t, you will still face the same problem.