Found the following at the Government website for my State, does further prove the point that every little thing needs to be tested.

Link: http://www.y2k.wa.gov.au/interest/know.html

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Do You Know?

At least 93% of PCs made before 1997 will fail to transition correctly from 1999 to 2000. Karl Feilder of Greenwich Mean Time has tested 500 types of these PCs and found 93% of the failed the BIOS test.

47% pf PC BIOS (including those for Pentiums) made in 1997 do not roll over successfully to Year 2000.

Type testing (testing of a particular type of machine and assuming other identical machines will be the same) may not hold water. This is because the chips for similar machines using apparently identical chips may come from different makers, some of whom had made them year 2000 compliant, while the other had not.

The failure date for some systems may come sooner than you think, say on 1 January 1999! This is because year "99" is not a valid year for these systems.

Some experts estimate that by year 2000, there will be 25 billion smart embedded systems in existence. If only 0.1% of them need replacement, we are talking about 25 million remake orders. There are not that many job shops in this world to satisfy everyone by 1/1/2000.

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Does anyone remember a few years back when one of the factories that produced ram chips burnt down or something? There was then a short supply of ram and the prices went up ...

Regards, Simon Richards

-- Simon Richards (simon@wair.com.au), February 23, 1999

Answers

Tracked down the Y2K white paper by Karl Feilder's that is the basis for the information quoted above. Here's the link:

http://www.gmt-2000.com/main.h tm

First, I am not a PC expert, so my comments/questions my be entirely irrelevant, but here goes:

1. The quote above says "The failure date for some systems may come sooner than you think, say on 1 January 1999! This is because year "99" is not a valid year for these systems."

He seems to be claiming that the BIOS in 93% of PC's made before 1997 and in 47% of PC's made in 1997 will fail. Since I haven't read any report of wide spread PC failures (and it's past 1/1/99), I've got to wonder what does Mr. Feilder claim happens when a BIOS "fails"? He doesn't state in the white paper.

2. I found it interesting that Mr. Feilder sells a product that he claims will "fix" this BIOS problem along with a host of other potential Y2K PC problems.

Is this a case of "buyer beware"?

-- David (David@BankPacman.com), February 23, 1999.