OK, so you have got the old PC you were given working. DOS is loaded and Windows 3.1 or 3.11 is up and running. There is however one slight hitch. The PC thinks it is 1980 or 2094. You can change it with the "DATE" command but it goes back as soon as you re-boot. Of course this may be precisely the reason the PC was given to you in the first place. It might have been a business machine which was taken out of use in 2000. Collected dust until it was given to you.

    Year 2000, Y2K or Millennium Bug. Not a computer bug at all but the inability of the PC to cope with dates above 1999. How narrow minded (sic) of the early programmers to not bother to code for the first two digits. It must have saved no more than  1Byte of memory. It must be remembered that the software of today is a direct descendants of the original computer software which  took men to the moon. The computer memory then was less than that of a cheap pocket calculator of today (Not a Palmtop PDA but a Calculator). They were expected to run code accurately and within a few milliseconds. A slight delay of a second or two would be enough for a collision instead of a docking or a crash instead of a landing. Multistage rockets had to fire precisely in sequence without hesitations.  In this context it would have been STUPID to slow it down, even minutely by adding unnecessary code.
    With the expected lifetime of a modern PC the simplest solution was to buy new PCs as that was what would have happened anyway as newer, faster, more powerful PCs came onto the market.
   
   However getting back to the afflicted PC, you can:-
1.    Put up with it. Especially if you do not use it for generating documents.
2.    Change the date with the command "DATE" at the DOS prompt. An improvement on this is to place the word "DATE" at the end of the AUTOEXEC.BAT .     Each time you boot-up you will then be invited to enter the date. Only a stop-gap solution in my mind, there has to be something better and there is.
3.    Download a Y2K fix from the internet. I did a Google search with " Y2K fix DOS" and got several possible fixes. They often come with a test utility which will check your system and tell you if it needs fixing and then either fixes it or invites you to start another little program to do so. Usually informing you that your system is now OK.
    In my experience I found that my fixed system still gave the wrong date when I re-booted. Not the fault of the program, the hardware and BIOS & CMOS options must be too many to cover every possible PC. Having failed to fix my old 386 or the 486 that a friend recently gave me I went for a different approach which I also found on the same Google search.
4.    A Year Substitution program called "My Self's Y2K fix 1.1. It allows you to specify the year to anything you like. I unzipped it and copied it into a directory called"Y2KFIX". Then I put the line "C:\Y2KFIX\Y2K.exe 2004" into the AUTOEXEC.BAT near the top. Of course next year I will have to alter it to "C:\Y2KFIX\Y2K.exe 2005" but I think the bother is minimal. No different to remembering the correct year every January when I write a cheque. Or for the eagle eyed among my  regular readers of the site, altering the year on the "Updated" date of the Home page 8-). On the other hand if the year is deliberately changed to for example run an expired date limited demo, the date will correct itself automatically on re-boot.
    I was so impressed with it that I have included this tiny program as a download should you need it. Click here   to download a copy of MY2K11.ZIP.