Sometimes when we watch classic movies from 1940s or 1950s, we encounter character are talking about 90’s. Obviously they are not talking about 1990s, they are talking about 1890’s. For people living in the early twentieth century, 90’s meant 1890’s. And now we are living in the early twenty first century, for us 90’s mean 1990’s.
It is much more clear if we state the year in four digits such as 1930. But it comes a little confusing when we use only 2 digits for writing the year such as 30. This is specially true for the Windows applications. If you use only 30, should Windows take it as 1930 or 2030? Well there is a Windows group policy that can make this easy for the Windows applications to interpret. We can set a boundary beyond which all the 2 digit years will be take as belonging to the 21st century.
Here is how you can change the way Windows 11 is going to interpret 2 digit years:
- Press Win+R hotkey to open Run dialog.
- In the Run dialog, type gpedit.msc and press Enter. This will open Group Policy Editor.
- In the Group Policy Editor, select User Configuration, then Administrative Templates and then System.
- On the right-side, double-click on the policy labeled Century Interpretation for Year 2000.
- In the properties window for this policy, select Enabled to enable this policy.
- Choose a year which is maximum for 21st century when 2 digits are used. By default it is 2029, but it is better to make it 2030 as more time has passed since the release of Windows 11. In the end, it is all up to the user.
- Click on the OK button to save the settings.
If you have selected 2030 as the maximum value in this policy settings, then all two digit years from 01 to 30 will be automatically converted to four digit years by appending 20 in front of them. For example, if you use 26, then it will automatically become 2026.
On the other hand, 31 to 99 will be taken as from twentieth century. For example, if you use 40, then it will automatically be converted into 1940.
Thanks for that my dear fellas!