Habitually Good

Today, I spent a good few minutes being flummoxed by a Windows Error while trying to connect to my laptop from my desktop using a Remote Desktop Connection. The error is shown below. It read, “Remote Desktop cannot connect to the computer because the authentication certificate received from the remote computer is expired or invalid. In some cases, this error might also be caused by a large time discrepancy between the client and the server computers”.

Here’s a screenshot of the error:

Now, I went and checked everything within my power to see why this error was occurring:

• double-triple checked the password.
• enabled-disabled firewall to make sure that was not the culprit – on both computers.
• checked the remote settings on the computer I was trying to connect to.
• and a number of other things.

Then I read the message carefully once. It said “In some cases, this error might also be caused by a large time discrepancy between the client and the server computers”. So, I told myself, that can’t be it. But just in case, I checked, and yes the laptop I was trying to connect to had a date which was behind by 4 years (no idea how). I fixed the date, and tried again. And it connected without any problem.

The uninitiated might say that I was dumb to not have listened to the error message to begin with. But here’s what I have to say to them – with Windows, you can never be sure that the error message is saying the right thing. And to prove that here is another error message that I got today itself.

I was trying to backup a file onto my external hard drive. It was a 5.5 GB file, and I had plenty of space on my external hard drive. Here’s the error message: “Cannot copy Outlook: There is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again. To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click Disk Cleanup”.

And here’s the screen shot:

Once again, I was perplexed for a moment. I had enough space on the drive. I thought maybe it needs some space on the source drive so for some temp files or something (stupid though, I know), and so I promptly cleaned that up. Then it struck me. My external hard drive had a FAT32 file system (don’t ask me why, it came that way out of the box, and I never bothered checking). And of course, 5.5 GB is over the limit of what you can put per file on a FAT32 file system.

Now, why couldn’t it give me that as an error? Of course, the fix was simple. I backed up everything from my external drive, and then formatted it as NTFS. And the file copied without any problem.

So, when Windows gives you an error message, it mostly doesn’t mean what it says, but then sometimes, it does.

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