Most frequently asked questions
September 1, 1998 -- The new STARS for Windows software was officially released for use on May 1, 1998. During these past four months, 75 US Navy security departments have purchased annual site licenses for STARS for Windows.During this time, 80% of the phone calls and emails that we received have involved just three issues:
| Is STARS Y2K compliant? | Yes. Every date field in STARS for Windows is formatted in
yyyy/mm/dd format
in strict compliance with NIBRS specifications. Thus, STARS can accurately
compute date differentials and sequencing for any date from Wednesday
January 1, 1000 until Friday December 31, 9999. If you would like to have an official-looking document that certifies STARS's Y2K compliance, click here to download a Word 97 document file that will attest to our Y2K certification. |
| Can we import our old STARS for DOS data into STARS for Windows? | Yes, except for your Incidents. The data formats of the new NIBRS
incident reports are very different from those of the old ICRs. For this
reason, your old ICR data cannot be imported. Thus, if you have any
open ICRs in STARS for DOS, you must finish and close these old cases
in STARS for DOS. Any new cases can be opened in STARS for Windows. All other data can be imported from STARS for DOS to STARS for Windows. |
| Help! We lost all our data due to a typhoon / power failure / system crash / etc. What do we do now? | The easy solution to this problem is to restore your STARS data
from your backup disk, file or tape. Hopefully, you or someone responsible
for your computer system(s) performs a complete backup of your STARS files
once every 24 hours. Although the only file you really have to backup is
STARSDB.MDB, we recommend that you backup your entire WINSTARS
directory. If you do not backup your STARS data regularly, we wish you the best of luck! You may need it. A better plan would be to start backing up your data today. |