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Windows is waiting for the end of the century

I was inspecting the list of timers in a complete memory dump and found that in x64 W2K8 R2 (it may be also in other versions) there is a timer set to fire for the end of our century 2001 - 2100:

1: kd> !timer
Dump system timers
[...]
    fffff80001c31b80   f690c4d5 0064364d [12/31/2099 23:00:00.510]  nt!ExpCenturyDpcRoutine (DPC @ fffff80001c31bc0)
[…]

Its disassembly shows at that time the following work item will be executed:

1: kd> uf nt!ExpCenturyDpcRoutine
[...] 
fffff800`01ae81ab 488d0dae991400  lea     rcx,[nt!ExpCenturyWorkItem (fffff800`01c31b60)]
[...]

I don’t want to dig myself far into the details here :-) May be someone from MS provides some comments what we should expect at the turn of the century? What should I tell my children to expect if they still run the Windows OS?

PS. Long live the Windows OS! (my the most sincere comment; no pun intended).

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -

This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Crash Dump Analysis, Fun with Crash Dumps, Futuristic Memory Dump Analysis, Windows Server 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Windows is waiting for the end of the century”

  1. Derek Says:
    August 27th, 2010 at 7:27 pm

    Turn your system clock ahead and find out what it does :)
    WinXP/Win2k3 only lets me go up to Dec 31 2099 12:59 PM, but it does roll over to 2100. But if you change it lower manually, you can never get it back.

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