Baffling Date/Time Force Reboot Error - Any ideas?

[JSpaced]

Hey Edugeeks, hope this is right place because I'm perplexed

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We have a suite of just over a year old PCs in our Sixth Form Study area and this morning a student came in to say: "Hi, the date's wrong on my computer and now the internet doesn't work."

 

1st: We have server time service operational, but I think there's a feature where if the client date and the server date gap is MASSIVE, it won't update. Not an issue, AFAIK.

 

2nd: We log in as sysadmin, reset the date back sixty years to today and reboot. Go into BIOS to check there and BIOS picks up the correct date from Windows (Huh? Thought it went the other way.) Couple of reboots, date still happy.

 

3rd: We log in as a student to see if the young scamps have been mucking about. Nope, student users can't muck about with the date/time. It's blocked by policy. Thumbs up emoji, all good.

 

4th: We check the login logs and find that during the day a student logged in, but never logged out. The next registered login is a member of staff prepping for an Open day registering as 2081 AD!!! (I really hope they had to fight Terminators as part of their pitch)!

So I reason that $staff arrived, needed a PC that was locked and yanked the power to reboot.

 

My question is: has anyone else seen the date on a PC be changed by an unexpected shutdown?

[mavhc]

I'd replace the battery as a first step, is it always the same date in the future? the clock ram might be dodgy

[JSpaced]

I'd replace the battery as a first step, is it always the same date in the future? the clock ram might be dodgy

 

It's only happened once and I suppose really I'm looking to eliminate "shenanigans". I guess we wait for it to happen again.

 

I was thinking battery, but low power battery would set the date to the past, rather than the future? (I assume, but as I said, this thing is really confusing me)

 

It's gone through a couple of standard reboots fine and the forced power off was the only thing that stood out as a possible cause.

[3s-gtech]

I’ve seen this before, and when observed I saw the clock on the PC running at super-extreme-Jules-Verne speed, winding days away in seconds. Pulling the power and winding the clock back fixed it.

 

Possible BIOS issue, but those same PCs don’t do it now (they were on 7 back then).

[JSpaced]

I’ve seen this before, and when observed I saw the clock on the PC running at super-extreme-Jules-Verne speed, winding days away in seconds. Pulling the power and winding the clock back fixed it.

 

Possible BIOS issue, but those same PCs don’t do it now (they were on 7 back then).

 

Well I didn't observe the "George Pal Time Machine" behaviour, which sounds pretty baffling, but I guess it makes sense if it did that after being forcibly restarted, then stopped once logged in (and the time service tried to kick in).

 

It's good to know that sometimes computers are "just a little bit random".