Industry opinion split

Year 2000 A standard has been called upon to address the millennium problem.

The industry is divided over whether the installed base of olderium problem. PCs will survive the millennium, with a trade association calling for a consistent approach to hardware compliance from PC vendors.

Steve Torbe, desktop product manager at Compaq UK, said: 'All the current machines have undergone testing by the National Software Testing Labs (NSTL) and have warranties. The cut-off date was 2 October last year.

The majority of machines prior to that date have also undergone testing.'

He added that the NSTL was used by the Canadian government for its year 2000 testing.

'There's also a downloadable Bios from our Website,' he said. Torbe insisted that corporates which use Compaq machines that pre-date 2 October can be updated manually.

But Keith Warburton, executive director of the Personal Computer Association (PCA), which includes IBM, AMD and a raft of systems resellers among its members, claimed there was no consistent approach from PC suppliers and that there needed to be a standard benchmark to ensure compliance, particularly in the Bios.

Warburton said: 'Compaq, for example, had said that from January 1997 all systems would be able to roll over the millennium problem. I have put a proposal to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) that we should have some sort of managed scheme for this. I wanted the DTI to propose a scheme where we could manage it because there is no agreement between the different PC vendors claiming year 2000 compliance.'

One source said Rob Wirszycz, when he was heading up the Computing Services and Software Association (CSSA) compliance scheme, spoke to the PCA last September and reiterated this fact. At the time, Wirszycz said there was a 'good likelihood' that new PCs might not have the Bios rollover correct.

It is unclear as to which major PC manufacturers have set up schemes that will ensure millennium compatibility.

The Computer Information Centre has set up a Website which evaluates different PC claims for compliance.

The site uses a number of different criteria to determine the facts.

These are described as the good, the bad and the ugly.

Major PC vendors are included in the list along with other relevant data, for example, about global positioning satellites (GPS) systems, which are not expected to be compliant.

Warburton said the whole question revolved around whether dates changed in Bios and other hardware peripherals, including graphics peripherals, and that it was nothing to do with software, which was a completely different issue.

Warburton also said the government-backed taskforce, Action 2000, had to get its act together on the hardware issue fast, as a number of his members had been complaining recently.