A survey by the British Consumers' Association suggests most of the software designed to fix millennium bugs in household PCs does not do the job. The Association's experts examined a number of software packages designed to test home computers for year 2000 compatibility. They discovered that most of the millennium bug fixes did not address all the problems lurking in computer software.
Most computer programs check two or more of a computer's clocks as they start up.
If the clocks give incorrect information, they may not function properly. But the Consumers' Association found very few software products would audit each application for chronological accuracy every time the software was used. Even when run on computer hardware which correctly determines the date after 2000, software like spreadsheets, databases and accounting programs which rely on dates to work effectively are likely to experience problems. The problem stems from the late 1960s when computer programmers decided to use only two digits to store the year part of the date so as to conserve then precious storage space. Computers will encounter problems deciding how to represent the year 2000 when it arrives.