Is Windows NT 4.0 Ready for the Year 2000?

With less than a year left until it's upon us, one of the hottest and most worrisome topics in the IT world is the Year 2000 and the disastrous effects it could have on the continuity of business. Those who aren't desperately tying to combat the Y2K bug are making millions off of it. Countless businesses, dedicated to helping companies and consumers deal with the Y2K dilemma, have formed over the past several years. Many of these will remain profitable well past the Year 2000 as they provide damage control for those businesses that underestimated the job on hand.

As a System Administrator, you have the biggest job ahead of you. You have to determine not only whether all your software will successfully handle the date conversion, but also whether all your hardware will handle it. By now, most vendors have statements of Y2K compliance for their product lines that should be of help with this process. (If they don't, they most likely won't be around in the Year 2000.)

In this article, we'll discuss the policy Microsoft has taken toward Y2K compliance and Windows NT. We'll also identify some of the Y2K issues that currently exist with Windows NT 4.0 and discuss the fixes you can download to correct them.

Microsoft's Y2K policy

Fortunately, Microsoft isn't one of those vendors that have underestimated the severity of the entire Y2K problem. If you visit Microsoft's Year 2000 Resource Center at www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k/, you'll see that they take the issue very seriously. They've provided this site as a resource for determining how your Microsoft products will be affected by the Year 2000. As Figure A shows, Microsoft has developed a statement of compliance that defines what criteria their products must meet to be considered Year 2000 Compliant.

Figure A: Read Microsoft's Statement of Compliance to understand the qualifying criteria.

[ Figure A ]

They've also developed a Year 2000 Product Guide, shown in Figure B, that will help you to track your Microsoft products based upon five categories of compliance.

Figure B: You can use Microsoft's Year 2000 Product Guide to find out whether the products you use are compliant under Microsoft's terms.

[ Figure B ]

At the time of this writing, Windows NT Workstation and Server 4.0 both rank in the category of compliant with minor issues. What exactly does that mean? Well, it means you have some work to do. Your work begins by making sure that your Windows NT machines meet the compliance prerequisites outlined by Microsoft. To see a list of these prerequisites, navigate to the Year 2000 Product Guide and select Windows NT Workstation from the Products list box. Click the Search button and then select the language version you're using. To meet the current state of compliance, Microsoft requires that you either download the post-Service Pack 3 Y2K hot fix or Service Pack 4 (SP4).

The Y2K dilemma and Windows NT

As most of you know, the problem that we're facing with the rapidly approaching Year 2000 is the result of a common effort by programmers to save computer memory. This was accomplished by storing dates as a two-digit value--the 19 being presumed. Therefore, when the date changes to January 1, 2000, many systems will instead read the year as 1900.

This storage method is prevalent with most mainframe systems that many programmers assumed wouldn't be around by the Year 2000. Therefore, the method used for date storage wouldn't be an issue.

The Y2K problem is made even more complicated by the fact that the Year 2000 also happens to be a leap year. Many programmers who did account for the Year 2000 didn't account for the leap year.

Fortunately, you don't have to worry about any major compliance issues with the Windows NT 4.0 operating system. The biggest issue, perhaps, is that User Manager doesn't recognize 2000 as a leap year. Therefore, you can't enter February 29 of the year 2000 as the expiration date for a user account. Some of the other Y2K issues that can be corrected by installing SP4 or the Y2K hot fix are:

Q183123: The date fields in the Find/Files or Folders feature will show incorrectly when the system date is 2000 or greater.
Q180122: After changing the time through Control Panel, Windows NT may skip a day.
Q183125: When you change the custom date property of a Word document using the two-digit short date, it's assumed that the century is 1900.

All of these updates may be downloaded from Microsoft's ftp site at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/nt40/hotfixes-postSP3/y2k2-fix/ by selecting the y2kfixi.exe file for x86-based PCs.

The lowdown on SP4

Microsoft has provided several versions of SP4 for installation: a Traditional version, a Web-based version, and a Year 2000 version. The Year 2000 version of SP4 should be used if your Windows NT system has more than one component with Y2K issues, such as Internet Explorer. To determine whether you need the Year 2000 version of SP4, run the Year 2000 SP4 Inspection Utility, which you can download from support.microsoft.com/support/ntserver/content/servicepacks
/sp4_central_40.asp?FR=0#y2kutility. If the utility doesn't find any other components with Y2K issues, you can install either the Traditional or Web-based versions instead. To find out more about these two versions of SP4, point your browser to support.microsoft.com/support/ntserver/Content/ServicePacks/Instalsp.asp. For additional information, we'll be covering SP4 in-depth in next month's issue.

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