All you experts out there - clear this up for me please - if you have an old PC (or new non-compliant one) and the bios date is wrong what will happen. Can you go in and change the bios like you can the time clock? If not, what will happen if you aren't running accounting type software, just word processing, pagemaker etc.

Also what will happen if Windows is ultimately not compliant even after patches - what will happen.

I basically understand the rest of the complicated stuff very well, but this simple stuff is very muddy to me.

-- Perplexed (clearthis@up.com), December 23, 1999

Answers

Provided electricity is up and you have access to the patches you need, you would load the new BIOS and update the patches.

You should not wait though...

-- STFrancis (STFrancis@heaven.com), December 23, 1999.

Ok, so you can update old BIOS always? I have been transferring everything to my new computer as fast as I can all year, but if the computer isn't going to totally go down without updating BIOS I will not push so hard. Or do I really need to update BIOS. That is what I am asking. What will happen if you DON'T.

Also wondering, again, what will happen if your WINDOWS is not compliant. Does it just stop - you can't get your desktop - or what?

-- perplexed (clearthis@up.com), December 23, 1999.

Yeah, you can change the BIOS ahead of time to see what happens (after doing so you'll need to power off for a couple minutes, then boot). When the machine boots you'll see something like, "[F1] to enter setup" -- note that hotkey is F1 on my machine but might not be on yours. Regarding your apps, check the vendor's website to see what they can offer in terms of compliance (either an upgrade or a statement). In response to your Windoze question: who knows. I'm fairly confident Win95 will not be compliant even after using Microslop's "patch". Maybe I'll get lucky. If it is ultimately not compliant it may mean unusually high number of illegal ops or it may mean time to buy a new OS.

Too bad we can't digest plastic, silicon, metal, glass, Microsoft cds, etc.

-- Mori-Nu (silkenet@yahoo.com), December 23, 1999.

Just declare it non-mission critical and put it on the end of the Fix On Fail list.

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), December 23, 1999.

Some people might actually have to shut down their computer and then reboot it. This is just a glimpse of how hard life will be in the post-y2k world.

-- computergeek (working@home.com), December 23, 1999.

How does my PC know what day it is? Can't I roll back the clock?

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), December 23, 1999.