Home > Technobuddy > Archives > 2007 > February > 12 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USYear 2000 bug redux
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just talked to a smart techie friend - a professional - who is worried about the mess the Congress has gotten us in.
He’s not talking about Iraq or even Nancy Pelosi’s airplane. Instead, he was talking about an act of Congress that changed the date that daylight savings time starts. My buddy said getting the computers in his workplace ready for that is tying up a lot of the resources in his computer department.
All this reminds me of the Y2K bug - Year 2000 - that was supposed to bring the world to a halt. The idea was that some computers kept track of dates using two digits with the assumption that the first two digits of the date would be 19.
I spent the first minutes of 2000 on the air at WSB-AM here in town, waiting for disaster to strike. Some of the most fearful had said that telephones would stop working, utilities would go out of service - it was basically going to be the end of life as we know it.
What happened? Not much of anything. That’s because the computer world spent a lot of time and money - just as my techie friend’s department is doing - getting ready.
Generally the problems that we know about don’t kill you, it’s the ones that we don’t know about that are fatal. I think that’s how it’ll be this time. But I’m linking to a Washington Post story that will let you learn more about the problem so you can get up to speed if this is new to you.
I’ll also add a link to from Microsoft for home users
I wouldn’t go out and stock up on ammunition, beer and toilet paper because of this, but it doesn’t hurt to - uh - keep up with the time.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: General
Comments
By CynicalGeek
February 13, 2007 08:42 AM | Link to this
We just finished a migration to Outlook for calendaring and task management(we already used it for Email) and in our particular situation, we are going to have to migrate to Exchange 2007 in order to put in place the fix for Extended Daylight Savings Time. I was looking forward to having some extra time to work on future projects, but due to our not purchasing Software Assurance for Exchange, we either have to migrate to Exchange 2003 or go ahead with Exchange 2007. I have a Yahoo widget on my desktop counting down the days. There just aren’t enough hours in a day.
By Jan Schessler
February 18, 2007 10:15 AM | Link to this
Hi Bill, I used your suggestion of 11/26/06 to use www.dslreports.com/tweaks for my slow computer. The site is not what you stated in the paper. To make a long story short, PCPitstop wants me to purchase the program for ~ $90.00 (via Paypal) to subscribe to their service. I did do a checkup w/them, and they found tons of stuff that should be removed from my computer, but I would have to purchase their product before I could remove the contents that are ‘supposedly’ slowing down my computer. Should I do this???? Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Also, I am a complete novice when it comes to the workings of a computer; I can use it (like a car), but I don’t know how it works. Thank you, Jan.
By Mason Barge
February 18, 2007 12:45 PM | Link to this
Re: Jan Schessler’s comment that PCPitstop isn’t free. You just got a bit confused. The primary service at PCPitstop is free and it’s an outstanding service. It won’t make any changes on your computer — you have to pay for that — but it will give you an amazing, thorough analysis.
Many or most of the changes they flag can be solved for free. Most of those can be done by a novice. For instance, if you need to defrag your hard drive, just Google “defragment XP” or something and you will find simple instructions. (PS, my example of defragging a hard drive will take your computer a long time — maybe an hour — to finish, so do it while you’re watching t.v. or something.)
Go back and investigate a bit longer.
By Bill
February 18, 2007 03:02 PM | Link to this
Jan, DSL Reports is just a place where you can test your speed - not a place to buy stuff, so I don’t know where you went or what you did. But the speed test is here