This week, I sat down and reminisced with our in-house developer James Motch about his brainchild , and an error that gave us a headache for 3 solid weeks.

We had received an Acer desktop on January 29th of this year, and our usual preparation methods went off without a hitch. After installing and starting WorldBench, the first sets of tests ran smoothly for a short while, but were halted by an unusual--and rare--error.

"The date 2/14/10 is invalid, and WorldBench cannot continue"

February 14th? It was February 1st when we ran into this error, and I was not in love with the situation. We began troubleshooting by changing the date through Windows and the BIOS, but neither fixed the problem. After throwing away 2 hours on the machine, I asked our developer James what he thought. The look plastered across his face was of astounding bewilderment, and remained that way for about half an hour.

After determining that this error had no effect on the testing results--and that this was the first time this error had occurred--we then spent two and half weeks trying figure out what was happening and why. We restored the computer's factory settings thrice, we crawled through the WorldBench setup process several times and then we took turns brooding and trawling the internet for an answer. Three weeks later, James found the solution.