"Two thousand zero zero, party over, oops, out of time". So sang the diminutive purple pop star, Prince, before he became AFKAP. And he, along with plenty of prophets and doom-merchants, may be right. The year 2000 is taking on increasing significance in the IT industry, as the potential for disaster looms. And all because of two little numbers - 1 and 9. These are the numbers left out of the date fields in countless computer programs, saving two bytes of space each time but ensuring that the year '00' could just as easily mean 1900 as 2000. Correcting this problem is costing millions, and even the end-user is not immune.

So what should you do? Well, the first thing to do is to ignore adverts like the following, seen in a Sunday supplement catalogue offering millennium bug-fixing software. "Even with a new PC and/or compliant software your PC Hardware could today, or at any time in the run up to the year 2000, suddenly start 'creating' false information, or even cease all functions, thereby rendering all Software, Games, etc., inoperable". What a load of drivel. PCs crash all the time, and it's nothing to do with the millennium bug, for the simple reason that, well, we're not at the end of the millennium yet.

If you're a home user, and your PC is quite new, the chances are that its BIOS, which controls the basic PC functions, will be year 2000-compliant. You can check with the PC manufacturer and with the BIOS manufacturer's Web site for confirmation. Then it's just a case of getting patches for the applications you use regularly. For most users, that's just three or four applications plus some multimedia reference software and games, with the latter two being largely date-independent. So the chances are you can make yourself bug-proof within about a day.

Corporate IT managers have a more challenging task, and probably won't be out celebrating on New Year's Eve, 1999. If you've been putting off that company-wide system upgrade, you might like to consider implementing it before the end of next year. Where software is concerned, however, network distribution of patches should provide a short-cut solution, and you could probably combine that with a software audit, removing any illegal or unnecessary software from users' machines. Legacy software is likely to provide more serious headaches, though, particularly in accounts departments.

More worrying is the potential for data corruption in the financial services industry. Not only do pensions, investment and insurance companies often rely on computer systems decades old (therefore requiring rare and outrageously expensive COBOL programmers to fix the date bugs), but they also have to come to terms with European Monetary Union, and must upgrade their systems accordingly. No problem, say these companies. We've already got the programmers on site, and they'll be finished in September 1999. What some of them may not realise is that to gain an accurate estimate of the number of months needed to complete a programming project, you should take your best estimate, double it and then add on your age. And that's assuming that your programmers don't all desert you in favour of a more lucrative contract. Gazumping is alive and well in the Y2K contractor market, and programmers have as much loyalty as cats.

To quote from Prince again, "Tonight I'm going to party like it's 1999". A more appropriate lyric might be "Tonight I'm going to worry 'cos my pension's on the line". Of course, if we're lucky everything will run smoothly and there will be no problems whatsoever. But in our opinions the best way to spend the transition from one millennium to the next* is cheerfully and optimistically drunk.