MacBook Pro Lion Recovery Cannot Reinstall I am a programmer and more active on Stack Overflow. Anyways, I am clean-reinstalling my mum's MacBook Pro and I came across a problem. First, I went into recovery mode (Command-R at startup) then erased the Macintosh HD drive. After have had with my computer previously:


Date being set to 2001. (As a programmer I know this is a default NSDate.)
Microsoft Word keeps on bringing up random popups.
Warning that apps may behave erratically because of the date (maybe why Word does that).
Safari always needs to confirm some Facebook certificate keychain signing thing.
Quite slow/buggy
And also, the back of the MacBook screen has a problem that when I press on it the screen gets blurry at that part. (Like strongly touching the screen)


So then when I try to reinstall, the Macbook needs to check its authenticity with Apple, where it needs to gather some installation information. It just gets stuck here, nothing happens; I left it for 2 hours and it is still trying to gather information.

So, what do you think is generally wrong with this computer and how can I fix this problem? Do you think the only way out is to arrange an appointment with Apple?
Most of the problems seem to be coming from having the wrong date (and possibly not having internet access).

You might as well zap the PRAM. If you have problems, see here.  Then be sure you are connected to both power and internet when you reboot.  If necessary, set the clock manually.  

The issue with the screen, well, it depends on how hard you're pressing and which model MacBook you're using, but it is not necessarily unusual.  

UPDATE: I've been reminded that one cause of computer slowness is a failing hard drive.  Sadly, despite S.M.A.R.T status reporting, it's very hard to be sure if a drive is failing until it has completely failed.  See if you can boot off an external drive and compare the performance.