Microsoft warns of PC Y2K risk

 

 

By John Davidson

 

 

Most businesses are seriously underestimating the complexity of solving the PC side of the millennium bug problem, the man in charge of Microsoft's year 2000 compliance strategy said yesterday.

 

Many of the problems facing PCs, their operating systems and application software at the turn of the century were worrisome, but for many companies they wouldn't be critical enough to warrant repair, the year 2000 strategy manager at Microsoft, Mr Jason Matusow, said during a visit to Sydney.

 

But for some companies, particularly ones that used PC-generated dates to feed into back-end systems, the results of ignoring the PC part of the millennium equation in favour of concentrating on fixing the back-end systems could be disastrous, he said.

 

The problem was, deciding whether or not to divert precious resources into making PCs compliant was a "very slippery decision-making process" and actually fixing the PCs could be a mighty hard thing to do.

 

"It's a surprisingly complex problem for something that seems so simple," he said.

 

Microsoft had defined seven layers of potential problems – ranging from the BIOS chip in the PC to the way the PC network interfaced with other systems – that needed addressing.

 

"The complexity of the issue is not in any one component, but it's the mix of components that's so dangerous," said Mr Matusow.

 

For example, while 96 per cent of Microsoft's software was either Y2K "compliant" or "compliant with minor issues", the BIOS chips in some PCs meant that Microsoft's Y2K solution would only work for a year and would break again in 2001.

 

The BIOS chip provides the interface between a PC's central processing chip (such as the Pentium II chip), and the PC's "real-time clock", which contains a quartz chip.

 

While PC real time clocks are Y2K compliant nowadays, most BIOS chips are not and will strip the year field of a date back to two characters ("00" instead of "2000") before handing it onto the operating system.

 

Microsoft had fixed this problem in its operating systems but, for BIOS chips that reset each time the computer was switched off, the fix would only last a year since the fix only applied to the year "00" and not "01", Mr Matusow said.