Millennium fever is everywhere in the IT industry, as companies and individuals attempt to ensure that their systems will survive the transition from 31/12/1999 to 01/01/2000. The problem is two-fold, at the very least. First, the actual PC hardware must be made to understand that when the time comes to trip over to the new decade, it should record the date as being in the year 2000 and not, for example, some time in 1980. Secondly there's the morass of software bug fixes that have to be installed in order to ensure that each and every application knows how to correctly deal with dates such as '00', '01' and so on.

The second part of the problem is causing plenty of headaches, but the first part - the hardware part - is of more concern to anyone owning a computer more than a couple of years old. The BIOS chip in such machines, which controls the basic operation of the PC, is liable to behave unpredictably at the end of 1999. BIOS upgrades, either in the form of chips or as software patches to a particular chip, are available. But these can be tricky to track down and sometimes even harder to install. This piece of software aims to provide a more general solution.

Supplied on a self-booting floppy, the Year 2000 Clock Fix first scans its own disk to ensure that there is no virus corruption, before testing the host PC's clock for Y2K compliance. If all is well, you can then use the disk on another system. If not, however, the software will install a 1.3KB TSR (terminate and stay resident) utility that keeps an eye on the clock's operation, correcting any errors during the millennium transition and at any time in the year 2000.

In an attempt to ensure that disk errors, viruses or careless users don't accidentally delete the relevant files and so remove the clock fix, the installation procedure stores its files in multiple directories at seemingly random locations on your hard drive. If one of these is removed, the others will still be there to replace it. It's not totally fool-proof, because fools can be highly ingenious, but as long as you don't format your disk or hack all the relevant lines out of the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, it stands a good chance of surviving the next year or so and guiding your PC's hardware safely into the next millennium.

This is most definitely not a panacea for Year 2000 ills. All it does is provide a method for older PCs to be made compliant in hardware, without the need for a physical BIOS upgrade. But it is more robust than some similar solutions, so hopefully all you'll have to do is worry about the software side of things.