how's this for a bug?

Ok, tonight, to make a long story short, me and a friend were messing around in my g/f's computer bios, and changed the year to 2075, along with changing several other settings. We boot into XP and stuff starts crashing (trillian, folding, etc). So we hop back into the bios and put everything back, well, everything but the date. Back to XP, same problems. Ok, go back, change the date to 2002, and it's fine...

Turns out, when the year in the bios was set to 2075, it was somehow causing memory errors, causing everything to crash.


anyone else ever hear of something like this?

The strangest thing I have ever seen...though it kept us busy for an hour trying to figure it out.

That is called the 2038 bug. The date is stored as seconds starting from a point, that I have forgotten. The number is stored as 32bit number and runs out in 2038

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question75.htm

So win98 would probably refuse to boot at all then?
Maybe the computer thought it was too old to work?
According to M$'s "lifecycle" pollicy all operating systems will not be supported after nine? or seven? years of general availability...they don't want the os to last too long, so you will have to upgrade....if win95 was perfect, then nobody would care about all the rest, and just d'l the latest updates,patches,etc.
If they ever come out with the perfect os, they would go out of business, or branch to other areas...can you say MS TV?

It not windows seeing that it is too old to work but a problemn with the liberarys in C++ used to program windows can only store a 32 bit number as the date (stored in seconds from 1970) and will crash if a bigger number is used. 64bit liberarys can be used to solve this problem.

huh, so that's what caused it... I didn't even think to check the system clock in windows to see what it said.

thanks