Incorrect hardware date affects Windows activation

Pederia · 01 Mar 2012

Hello.

I got my ASUS notebook back from repair, and it said Windows wasn't genuine. I knew it was genuine, because I had passed validation before.
I phoned Customer Service at Memory Express, where I had gotten it repaired, and where I had purchased it in the first place, and they didn't know what was wrong.
Today, I realized that I had experienced this problem before, and both times it happened after updating the clock, which was somehow incorrect. I had a hunch that the hardware clock somehow affected validation, and went into the BIOS to fix it. After updating the hardware time, I attempted validation again, and succeeded.

If anyone else has this problem, Windows suddenly failing validation, try changing the hardware clock.

Jerryw · 01 Mar 2012

Yes Windows has did that several times on other computers over the years i have had it installed on!

NoelDP · 02 Mar 2012

Pederia said:

If anyone else has this problem, Windows suddenly failing validation, try changing the hardware clock.

There is never any need to go into the BIOS to change the computer time and date - it's best changed using the Date/Time options in Windows
First check that your region or Tiime Zone is set right for your actual location, then that the date is correct (including the year - it's surprising how often everything but the year is right!). Then check that the actual time is nearly correct (an hour or so either way is close enough), and then use the 'Internet Time' tab options to update the actual time - this will set it far more accurately than you can, and ensure that everything else is correct.

It's not unusual (although bad practice) for a machine to come back from a repair shop with the wrong time settings, either because they didn't reset it properly after changing a battery, or because they reset the region (some machines go to another country for repair - in the UK, if you take your Acer in to PCWorld for them to 'fix it' it will often go to Germany!), and it's reset to local time there.

If you run an MGADiag report when your machine goes non-genuine (or validation fails), and the time is out, you will usually see an error such as...
Validation Status: Clock sync error
You can also check by going to the validation diagnostics site for a quick checkup - www.microsoft.com/genuine/diag which should indicate the clock error, and also tell you if you have some other problems affecting validation.

HTH