will happen come Jan 1 2000? Will I still be able to get online? Use word 97? Will my system boot up at all? I do have the pach for windows95 from Microsoft to install... will that help? What exactly will my puter do? anyone? I have a packard bell 486, I have tested it with software provided by PB, it says I need a bios upgrade that costs $70... why isin't this free? I thought the patches and stuff like that were free.

-- Onfire (maybelater@home.now), October 10, 1999

Answers

Your "Packard Smell" as we jokingly refer to them, is toast. It's not worth $70. You have a problem with your cmos embedded chip on your motherboard. It has a Real Time Clock in it which cannot be reconfigured. You should have purchased a Macintosh .....they will run till 2017!

The patches you can get for free are only for software..operating systems and applications. Your problem is with your "firmware".

Hope this helps you understand your situation a bit better.

-- john (vacajohn@jccomp.com), October 10, 1999.

If you only use your computer for games
and word processing it may be the only
issue is that you will have to manually
set the date to 2000 after the rollover.
Many freeware utilities will report whether
your BIOS can maintain the year 2000 once that
it is entered. You can manually change to 2000
and reboot to see if it keeps the date. There
is also an issue with date macros but all these
are minor if you do not use your computer for
business.


-- spider (spider0@usa.net), October 10, 1999.