1. Assess whether it is safe to open equipment operationally, as interlock on door / enclosure may enforce a plant shutdown. Some security systems contain tamper sensors that trigger an alarm if the equipment is opened. Provision must be made for dealing with such alarms.

2. Attach earthed wrist-strap and connect to earthing stud at rear of DELTA-T Probe case.

3. Open system casing. Perform an initial inspection of circuitry to assess the health and safety aspects of carrying out testing, and that no high-voltage (>40v) power is exposed.

4. Identify type of electronics present in system, and assess whether the system is microprocessor controlled. Some simple control systems contain only discrete logic chips or gate array chips, which cannot be tested using the DELTA-T Probe.

5. Enter details of system into laptop PC application, and confirm each item on the health and safety checklist has been carried out.

6. Identify RAM, ROM and RTC chip components, using the knowledge base of chip numbers (shown right) in the software as an on-line guide. Assess whether safe access to the chips using test clips is possible. Include accessible chips in the 'target IC' list.

7. Attach clips (shown left) to the target ICs as instructed by PC application, and wait for confirmation light on each signal-conditioning pod to light up. Clips types for different chips are identified by letters.

8. Leave DELTA-T Probe to analyse the system's memory, which may take several minutes.

9. Select items from the 'suggested clock location' list and visually check for presence of clock-related data. This may require looking at the data in several different encoding and display formats to determine whether only time, or full time and date, is being maintained by the system.

10. Select the identified clock location (if one could be found), and confirm the type of clock present.

11. Leave the DELTA-T Probe to capture relevant code samples, which may take several minutes.

The email message contains information about the system and code samples taken from it. This can be forwarded to a validation service that will analyse the results and report on the findings. The steps for validation are as follows:

1. Examine sample summary data to determine whether system contains clock-related information.

2. Validate code samples against known status sample data in case a validated match is found.

3. Examine each code sample in turn, marking start and end-points for code disassembly.

4. Examine code disassembly for evidence of century date inclusion in comparison calculations, or implementation of 'date window' compensation code.