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Windows has date flaws

Microsoft officials say only WIN98 is fully year 2000 ready

BY FLORENCE OLSEN

GCN Staff

GCN senior editor Michael Cheek contributed to this story

Microsoft Windows 98, now under Justice Department scrutiny, is the only fully year 2000-ready operating system from Microsoft Corp. Other Microsoft OSes aren't quite there yet, even though company officials describe the current Windows 95, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows NT 4.0 releases as "compliant, with minor issues." The company earlier had said its 32-bit operating systems were ready for 2000. "Each operating system has unique issues that we've tried to address with updates," said Chris Barker, a Microsoft architectural engineer. The news from Microsoft means that government systems administrators who stay with current Win95 and NT versions must sooner or later download the company's free year 2000 upgrade files and distribute them to Windows users. The fixes apply to the OSes, not to Microsoft's or other vendors' applications.

Barker said distribution tools such as Microsoft Systems Management Server would likely lighten the load for administrators who will have to inventory the PC products on their networks and apply year 2000 patches, in some cases, to thousands of client PCs within the next 19 months.

Few federal government agencies have even begun testing their Microsoft applications, said Gayle Finch, year 2000 project coordinator for the Health and Human Services Department.

"We've been focusing on our large legacy systems, and I think so has everybody else," Finch said. Federal agencies, however, will be getting around to those applications soon and may be waiting for Windows 98, Finch said "I believe that that's Microsoft's mainline strategy for year 2000 compliance, and naturally they're going to make everybody buy it," she said. Some employees in HHS are still using Windows 3.x, Finch said. "Like most government agencies, we don't typically get the latest and greatest as soon as it's available," she said. "And frankly, some of the stuff is overkill for your typical user who is still doing mostly word processing, e-mail and a spreadsheet or two."

The newly revealed problems in current versions of Win95's WINFILE.EXE stem from the Windows File Manager, which does not display dates beyond the year 2000, and from the Date command in COMMAND.COM, which cannot interpret two-digit year dates expressed as, say, 00-79.

Fixes for the WINFILE.EXE and COMMAND.COM files, for instance, are in a WIN95Y2K.EXE file that administrators can download free from Microsoft's Web software library at :

http://www.microsoft.com/ithome/topics/year2k/product/win95.htm.

All Win95 operating systems also have some century date issues involving the Date tab in the Find File or Folders dialog box, for which Microsoft so far has provided no separate fix. The Date tab displays only two-digit year date fields, and after 2000 it cannot display the correct year. The tab also fails to return correct answers in searches for file changes occurring past 12/31/99.

Microsoft officials said they have no separate fixes yet for the Date tab problems, but they advised installing Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or a later version of the browser. Netscape Navigator and earlier versions of Internet Explorer do not have the File Find fix. Internet Explorer, a central item in the Justice Department's antitrust investigation of Microsoft, contains a variety of updated system files, Barker said.

As Microsoft updates files over time, Barker said, it often puts the new files first into Internet Explorer, Office or other Microsoft applications that immediately need such files. Microsoft engineers expect to finish their year 2000 testing of Windows NT3.51 soon. Administrators can fin more about year 2000 fixes at the sites :

http://www.microsoft.com/year2000 and http://support.microsoft.com/support.

Microsoft lawyers, apparently worried about a separate legal assault by Microsoft users, have issued strongly worded liability disclaimers about the products' ability to display and properly compute dates after Dec. 31, 1999.

"In no event," the official disclaimer notes, "shall Microsoft Corp. or its suppliers be liable for any damages whatsoever including direct, indirect, incidental, consequential of business profits, punitive or special damages, even if Microsoft Corp. or its suppliers have been advised of the possibility of such damages."