On 26 Apr 99, at 20:59, Bruce Boschek wrote:

> Without wishing to antagonize, offend or discourage anyone about this
> subject, I was somewhat surprised to hear recommendations of old DOS
> programs such as Word 5, etc. I have been discouraging folks from
> bothering with these because there are only 9 months left "officially"
> before the end of the millennium and I have been told by a number of
> sources including M$ here in Germany that these programs will not be
> able to deal with dates >2000 and there will be no patches nor any
> support for them after that time. What's more, the 286s that I threw out
> last had bios' that would not accept a date beyond 1999 and there are no
> bios updates from Phoenix for these machines.
>
> Am I just imagining something here, have I been ill-informed or is this
> just a short-term solution to a problem?
>
> If this is all balderdash, please forgive me.

  I did mean to mention that even if he could get Windows 3.x to run on this
machine, there would not be *any* support from Microsoft for any Y2K issues
encountered.  Thank you for reminding us.

  On the other hand, the machine is not going to catch fire or blow up in 9
months; it won't become substantially less capable than it already is.
Editting kids' homework is not an application that critically affects matters
of food, energy supplies or family financial security.
  My feeling, then, is that there may indeed be some Y2K issues with this
machine, but they threaten only minor disruption of the use he plans.



David G

            PCBUILD maintains many useful files for download
              on our web site - visit our download page at:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/files.html