For some unknown reason, the clock on my desktop machine jumped ahead by one day sometime last night, so that the dates on the files I was creating were one day ahead of the correct date. This caused me a lot of annoyance and wasted time when my attempt to synchronize files with my laptop (which I run my work programs on) overwrote my latest files with older ones because of this date discrepancy. By the way, both machines are running NT 4, SP 4, if that matters. I don't know whether this has anything to do with Y2K, but it hasn't happened before in the year or more I've been using these machines. In any event, it's certainly weird.

-- Steve Heller (stheller@koyote.com), December 25, 1999

Answers

Do you have any kind of auto routine maintenance scheduled or any software that "looks ahead" and does routines automatically? If so, it may not have read the 1/1/00 correctly. One of the patches for WinDoze '95 had a correction for that problem. I don't have that link anymore, but it was recently discussed on the microsoft tech support newsgroup. Seems like NT 4 was mentioned as having the same problem but needing a different fix.

-- (livinginthefuture@MTV.com), December 25, 1999.

It's not unusual for the date to occasionally jump ahead when using Windows......

Mine was running one day ahead a couple of months ago........not sure how long it was like that before i noticed it........

A couple of years ago my date suddenly jumped ahead from 1998 to 2098.....the cause of it was likely from inputing data from a digital camera......the helpdesk had had a lot of calls that found the problem was an advanced clock, and in every case the users had inputted data from a digital camera recently.......

One good thing.....I now know that my system will run okay after the rollover. Of course, I plan on having my system shut down just in case......

-- Craig (craig@ccinet.ab.ca), December 25, 1999.

As far as I know, I have no scheduled maintenance programs set up. But with Microsoft's penchant for hidden stuff, who knows?

-- Steve Heller (stheller@koyote.com), December 25, 1999.

Talk about a weird date change...

In the morning of December 24, I printed out some websites that I had just read and showed them to my son. He noticed that the date was 3/29/2000 on the bottom of the page. I then checked the reports that I had printed out earlier that morning and they read 12/24/1999.

I tried Guard Dog to erase some of the files that may have been left behind and I kept getting error messages that I was out of memory.

I tried to quit Windows 98 (Second Edition with the proper patches) and reboot into DOS. I got a grey screen with no C prompt.

I did a complete shutdown and Windows did come up. I tried again to restart in DOS mode and it did allow me to do so. When I tried a Dir command, I got the message, "Your program caused a divide overflow problem."

I did get the info that I had appx. 400 MB used of my 1.5 Gig drive. My recycle bin was empty and I thought that I might have picked up a Virus. I tried to boot up with the McAfee start-up disk, but it would not work.

I then tried a program called VIEWCMOS.exe (I think it came from the fix program from Y2kNewswire) and it showed three of my clocks. The RTC clock read 12/24/99 with the correct hours and minutes and the BIOS clock also had the correct date and time. The DOS clock read 3/29/2000 and the screen was frozen and filled with thousands of different binary(?) numbers.

I called my tech friend and we arranged all my small icons by date. The dates would not arrange in any recognizable sequence and there were 6 files with 3/29/2000. In spite of the tech's objections, I deleted them. Some of them began with "ffast" or "findfast."

He told me that I would have to bring it in but that he was swamped. A lawyer had offered him $200 an hour to come out on Cmas day to fix a problem.

This morning, I ran the Year2000 fix program and everything seems to be ok and working. Strange!

-- Cant Say (NoWay@Chicken.Com), December 26, 1999.