Abacus discovers Y2K-ready PCs are failing key clock test

A company is claiming up to 98 per cent of so-called Y2K-compliant PCs are failing hardware real-time clock (RTC) rollover tests - and it's not afraid to prove it.

With Monday marking 200 days left to the millennium, the last thing IT managers and company management want to hear is that the computer systems that cost millions of dollars to make Y2K-compliant are actually not compliant.

But Henrik Christensen, managing director of Abacus ComputerCare (HK), 'a provider of environmentally friendly, preventative maintenance services' for computers, claims that even Y2K-ready Pentium III PCs are failing tests on RTC.

To prove his point, Mr Christensen last week held a press conference at which he demonstrated new models from top-brand PC and notebook vendors were failing Y2K tests on the RTC.

He says that IT managers with similar problems face an interesting dilemma. Do they sum up the courage to return to the board of directors and inform them the systems that were stated as Y2K-compliant are actually not quite compliant yet? Why are brand new 'Y2K-ready' PCs still being shipped without an RTC fix? We put this question to PC vendors but got no straight answers. IBM did seem interested and was co-operative, but Dell Computer was not.

While IBM's people were eager to investigate and find out the exact basis for the claims, the folks at Dell rather uncharacteristically referred us to their public relations company.

IBM was more forthcoming and a Y2K expert called twice to discuss the issue.