Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Upgrades Made To Make City, County Ready For Year 2000

Prescott and Nevada County are ready for the change from 1999 to 2000.

Pat Wilson, city secretary, said all city computers have been upgraded and are now Y2K compliant.

The city's billing program was the biggest issue to be handled for Y2K, but the Little Rock-based company providing Prescott with the software came down and did an upgrade.

The computers have been tested and should be ready for the next millennium.

The same can be said for all county computer systems.

Nevada County Judge James Roy Brown said at one time there was only one computer in the courthouse not Y2K compliant. This was the municipal clerk's system, but Michelle Glass, the clerk, requested funding for an upgrade.

The Nevada County Quorum Court and Prescott City Council provided the necessary monies and the system has been upgraded and is now Y2K ready.

Glass said the system was updated from Windows 3.11 to Windows 98, was then reconfigured, tested and found to be Y2K compliant.

The same can be said for the computer systems in the Nevada County Sheriff's Office.

Rip Sutton, at Ron-Tek, built the systems for the NCSO and said all are ready for the date changeover.

The systems, he said, were thoroughly tested six or seven months ago, with all passing the test but one.

This computer, though, stands alone and is not connected with the others in the department. It, he said, is not essential to the operation of the NCSO.

Sutton said he did both manual and software tests on the systems, with them passing. In addition, he continued, they were tested for the year 2000 leap year, and are ready for it as well.

February 2000 will have 29 days, and this could cause a slight problem with some systems, but nothing catastrophic. Only the dates would be wrong, and this is easily remedied.

There has also been talk about vehicles being ready for the year 2000. Cars built in the last decade all contain computer chips.

But, representatives with Hope Auto Co. and John Hays said these chips are for diagnostic testing only.

Auto company service departments hook their computerized testing equipment to the chips to find out what and where a problem may be. The chips have nothing to do with the operation of a vehicle otherwise.

However, Hope Auto and John Hays have upgraded their testing equipment so they can continue to service vehicles.

As long as vehicles have gas and are in good repair, they should run on Jan. 1, 2000.