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Nightmare on Elm Street

bluegrass

Well-Known Member
This is probably a very rare occurrence but I thought I'd pass it along just in case you ever run into it.

Scenario: I was just given two new SP3's - I7 - 512 gig - 8 gig, to setup for customers. I have setup over 20 of them where I work. They came in with Windows 8.1.

Symptoms:
1. I went through the standard follow the bouncing ball to set them up and when I went to the Internet to upgrade them to Windows 10, it automatically logged into a Microsoft.com/...../.... with a list running down the left side of the screen. I decided as I usually do to go toe Google.com to find the URL to upgrade. Upon reaching Google.com I received a security trust error. Same thing happened to a few other sites but a few came up OK.
2. After being perplexed about the above, I did some searching around on the Surface and found that the Surface was not activated. I went though the process to Activate online and it came back and said it couldn't. I finally went through a process over the phone which is excruciated to do because you have to key in a whole lot of numbers twice. It did get activated but didn't help the problem.

Fix:
I called Microsoft technical support and after about 10 minutes, they came up with solution. Unbelievable, he asked me to look at the date and time on the computer. It was set to a date in January of 2015. I corrected the time and date and the Internet worked fine after that.

I guess because these Surfaces had sat in a warehouse somewhere for over a year the date never got updated. I spent at least 5 hours troubleshooting and resolving this problem caused by having an old date set in the computer.
 
I had a very similar issue with a customer's system about 2 weeks ago. The time was correct but not the date so it took me a while to realize what was causing all the problems. The customer is a CPA and her accounting program needed something posted in 2015 so she changed the system date and forgot. When that happens, multiple things start going wrong.
 
I had a very similar issue with a customer's system about 2 weeks ago. The time was correct but not the date so it took me a while to realize what was causing all the problems. The customer is a CPA and her accounting program needed something posted in 2015 so she changed the system date and forgot. When that happens, multiple things start going wrong.

You're telling me. I would have never thought to check the date because of these weird problems. I'm so use to the date automatically being right from being on a domain. I know that there can be other weird symptoms when the date is off. I will never forget this one.
 
I keep telling my self I'll never forget but because it only happens once a year or so I forget one time to the next anyway. My excuse, I'm old! ;)
 
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