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Why not let the user at least give an estimate for the current time & date. Should be close enough for certificate validation.

Yes, that gets annoying fast for said user, but a good incentive to eg fix the bios battery.

Imagine there is no user, and there are thousands of machines

Just have those machines randomly ask one another for the time. Because of the Wisdom of Crowds the time will eventually be right.

/ sarcasm

Fair point. Another reason I don't want to manage thousands of Windows machines. Or even one for that matter.