What are the known PC Y2K problems?
A PC computer system maintains two system dates; one is in the CMOS Real Time Clock (RTC) – and one is in the operating system software. The CMOS RTC date is stored as century/two-digit-year/month/day. The CMOS RTC maintains its date until the PC is unplugged and the internal battery runs out. It may not maintain the century. In most CMOS RTC, when the year 99 overflows to 00 the century is unchanged so the effective year becomes 1900. Many operating system dates are kept as days-since-1980/01/01 that is converted to four-digit-year/month/day whenever a program asks for it. When the operating system start up, the BIOS usually sets its current date by retrieving the CMOS RTC date and converts it to days-since-1980/01/01. Operating systems, like DOS, maintain the date as long as the system is running. In DOS, year 1999 overflows to 2000. Until the system is rebooted there is no apparent problem. When DOS or Windows 95 boots the operating system can get an out-of-range date from the CMOS
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