I’m not sure what happened here. I walked up to my desktop, wiggled the mouse, and nothing happened. In the true definition of insanity, I then did it a few more times and achieved the same result. Hitting the keyboard didn’t help and it appeared frozen.

Weird, but no cause for concern immediately. I clicked the power button a couple times, which tends to shut things and and when that didn’t work, held it in for a power down. When the computer restarted, it came back up as though it had been in hibernate mode. I had a full desktop, which surprised me. However I was more concerned when it was operating very, very slow.

Everything seemed to take 30-40seconds or more, even opening a mail message. Since I have a quad core machine, x64, 8GB RAM, that’s unusual. Things usually fly around the screen. Then I happened to notice a reminder pop up from Outlook that said it was 2,000-some days overdue.

Huh? Like an episode of the twilight zone, I opened the time applet to see this:

I snapped a picture, changed the time back (which is interesting) and then rebooted. Things sped up and everything was back to normal, but I was a little concerned. How did my desktop move 29 years into the future? This picture still has the 2039 timestamp, so it’s always at the top of my picture list.

Very weird. Not something I’d expect in Windows 7, but I’ll keep an eye on it. This machine has been rock solid for over six months, so I’m not looking forward to any more surprises like this.