This test checks to see that your PC Basic Input Output System (BIOS) will allow the date to be set to 1/1/1980.
Note that this is not the same test as whether your PC Operating System will allow this date to be set (from within Microsoft Windows for example).
If your PC fails this test, it means that the BIOS will not allow the date of 1/1/1980 to be set into BIOS, which we have seen on a very small percentage of PCs to cause problems.
From our testing, we have seen this test failure mostly occur on PCs less than one year old.
The reason for this test is that some Operating Systems use what is called a Date Window to decide which century a YY date actually is in, and some of these use the year 1980 as a pivot date. If the pivot date can not be set into BIOS, we expect that the Operating System may experience problems correctly initialising after December 31st 1999.
As previously stated, this will only result in problems in a very few cases, and to be thorough, we have performed this date test.
If your PC BIOS fails this test, we suggest that you backup all data and programs on this PC, and then manually set the date to be December 31st 1999 at 23:58:00 and then switch the PC off.
Wait for five minutes and then reboot the PC. In most cases, where this is the only BIOS test which fails on your PC, the PC Operating System should have a date of 1st January 2000, and a time of about 00:05:00.
If it does show this date, please then reset the date to todays date and reboot the PC.
If it does not show this date, we suggest you contact the manufacturer or supplier of your PC, attempt to reset the date to todays date and you should be able to reboot the PC and use your programs as usual. If your PC hangs or refuses to restart, we suggest you copy your data from the backup onto an alternative PC.
