Why can’t we simply advance our clocks on the computer to 1159pm on 12/31/99 and wait a minute and see what happens?? If the computer works fine if not fix it?
My case being I have to spend all next week writing emergency measures and running reports for our hotel in case our computers, which have been Ok’d for Y2K go out. It seems like a waste of time.
I’m not an I.T. person – but I think that’s what our I.T. people at work have been doing all year. They created “dummy” companies and ran our in-house programs using Y2K dates to see if they’d run.
Should we be suspicious that they refuse to divulge the results?
markxxx
How can I put this? Actually, you can just change the date, it’s just a machine it doesn’t know any difference.
**Now, should you?**That is a whole different thing. There are several thing that can happen even if your test proved ok.
First, the machine is not going up in smoke or anything because of a date being wrong. If you just sit and watch it after the date should have rolled over you aren’t likely to see much.
That said though, every time you make chages to a file the time and date are recorded on the file. If you change something while you are checking and then switch back to the correct date. The date of the file is now later than the present date. Is that going to cause a problem when another change is made? Can it update a file with a time and date later than the one you are trying to use. You may have just created yourself a Y2K problem.
Another thing, Windows saves the registry each time you shutdown. If the registry is saved with a date later the the actual date and something happens to your system in the next week where Windows may need to go to a backup copy of the registry, how will it know which is the latest copy.
Little things like that are why it might not be a good idea, especially if you have data that would be hard to recover.