DocsBoot+ only manipulates dates for two purposes : to monitor whether the system's CMOS settings have been lost, and the unregistered version checks when it was installed and how long it will run. The first version of DocsBoot+ (0.00) was capable of handling dates through the year 9999 (yes, nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine), and subsequent versions have also been written with this in mind.

However, DocsBoot+ relies upon the date being stored in certain locations in the real-time clock. These locations were standard for quite some time, having been defined by IBM on the IBM PC/AT. However, in several recent implementations, the century byte (which was never stored in the proper place before, nor is it stored in a reasonable place now) has been moved. What this means is that, on certain systems, DocsBoot+ will be reading the wrong byte on the system clock as being the century.

Since this problem only affects the CMOS settings restore code, which will not fully restore the settings on most PCI systems, and unregistered copies, registered users who are affected can avoid any problems with DocsBoot+ by turning off the restore CMOS settings option on the Boot Parameters screen in the DocsBoot+ setup utility (this option does not work with most modern PCI based systems anyhow, and will probably be removed from the program in a near future version).

Even though this is not really a problem in DocsBoot+ (as a year 2000 capable system that stores the date in the IBM PC/AT locations would not be affected) a new version of DocsBoot+ (0.42:19990102, file dbp042d.zip) that uses the system BIOS to read the date instead of reading it directly from the RTC has been released. If your system hardware and firmware are not capable of handling dates from 2000 and later, DocsBoot+ does not fix that.

Registered users who need an older version updated to use the newer date reading method can contact Zac Schroff for more information.

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