The world is becoming more adjusted to what a modern workplace is due to many factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic response.  One of the many new problems that has come up for my organization is the issue of “Time Drift” for devices not on premises.  Some users are reporting a few minutes to a few hours difference to reality mainly causing meeting reminders to appear extremely late.  This caused me to delve into the realm of Time Servers and how/when devices communicate with them.  The following post provides background information on the issue and how to address it with a creative solution.

A few months ago, my techs were getting tickets from users stating that their Windows Search wasn’t working anymore. No results would populate the Search Box when users typed.

There are a multitude of sites/blogs that give instructions on how to fix this, and almost all of them essentially said, “If the above steps didn’t work, reinstall Windows!” This isn’t always convenient, or even an option

What I found works like a charm and usually takes just a few minutes to perform.

Starting with PowerShell v4, there has been cmdlets available to create scheduled tasks instead of using the schtasks.exe program, or the wizard.

My organization is using PowerShell v5.1 and there is a lingering bug from the Windows Vista days relating to setting an “EndBoundary” in order to have a scheduled task expire.  An expiration date/time is needed for the scheduled task to delete itself.  But, if you try to set this using the cmdlets, you get an error message.

This post is a culmination of tidbits I found on several other blog/forum posts, and a metric crap-ton of my own trial and error.  All because I wanted a scheduled task to delete itself once it was done.  That doesn’t seem like much, does it?  Yeah, I didn’t think so either, but it was.  My pain is your gain.
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