1. Save everything and close everything. Every program except your Web browser.

2. Especially close the programs that care about dates. Your family's money program, like Quicken or Microsoft Money. Your virus checker (ours decided its virus list was a hundred years out of date and nagged me about it). Your e-mail program, because anything you send will be dated 2000. And anything that runs by itself on a schedule, like ScanDisk at night.

3. Do NOT start any trial programs while the clock is ahead. A lot of shareware checks the date to see whether your thirty days are up. Jump it to 2000 and it decides your trial is over, and setting the clock back doesn't always bring it back. I lost a shareware game this way. It still says EXPIRED. That's the program I mean on the front page.

4. Don't save any files while the clock is ahead. They'll be stamped with the year 2000, and that can confuse backup programs and anything else that sorts by date.

5. Set the clock. In Windows 95 or 98, double-click the time in the corner of the taskbar. Date/Time Properties opens. Pick January in the month list, set the year to 2000 with the little arrows, and click the 1 on the calendar. Click OK.

6. Look at your page. Open it in your browser and read every date on it. If you have Netscape AND Internet Explorer, try both, because they break differently. Some pages look fine in IE and broken in Netscape, and if you only ever look at your page in IE you'd never know.

7. Set the clock back RIGHT AWAY. Double-click the time again and put in today's date. Then look at it again. Then look at it a third time. My first try, I put it back to 1998 by mistake, and I didn't notice until my dad's money program asked him something weird. (That's how he found out.)

8. Fix your page with the clock set right, using the checklist, and then test once more if you want to be sure. Same steps, same order.

On Saturday, August 14, 1999, with the clock set to January 1, 2000, I looked at thirty home pages that show the date with JavaScript. I found them in WebRings, on award pages and in my friends' bookmarks. I'm not naming any of them. That's not the point, and some of them belong to people who are nicer than their scripts. I looked at every one in Netscape 4.61, then in Internet Explorer 5.

In Internet Explorer 5, the eleven that said 19100 said 192000 instead. The five that said 100 in Netscape said 2000 in IE, so they looked fine there, which is exactly why their owners probably think they're fine. Only nine pages out of thirty were right in both browsers.

I e-mailed everybody whose page broke, nicely, with a link to the fix. Seven have written back so far. Four have fixed their pages already, and one wrote back to say thanks and that he was "pretty sure his page would be fine." It won't. I wrote again.