Eddie On Everything » windows xp

How to Fix the clock’s “An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with” Error

eddie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:14:05 +0000

Ah, daylight savings time.

The time of year that reminds us all that our computer’s automatic clock setting mechanism may not work as expected.

I’ve been getting the error message “”An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com” error message when trying to manually sync my clock to the Windows time server.

A screenshot of the error:

If you’re getting this error, here’s an easy way to fix it: change the value in the “server” field.

How to fix the time clock’s “An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with…” error.

Open “Date an Time Properties” by double-clicking the clock (in the system tray area) and choosing the “Internet time” tab. (Alternatively, you can get to the same screen by going to Control Panel->Date and Time.)
Change the value in the “Server” field to another valid time server. First try “time.nist.gov”. If that doesn’t work, try one of the following:
ts1.aco.net
nist1-la.WiTime.net
ntp.alaska.edu
utcnist2.colorado.edu
tick.ucla.edu
ben.cs.wisc.edu
time.xmission.com
If none of the servers listed above works, you may have a network problem. Either check your firewall, or keep trying servers from this list.

Hopefully one of the servers in this list will work for you!

How To Get a Kingwin USB Drive Enclosure To Work In Windows XP

eddie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:51:16 +0000

I foolishly purchased a Kingwin Blackjack BJK-35USBI from Newegg for the low price of $14.99 + Shipping and Handling.

Big mistake – this thing is terrible.

First, the documentation says nothing about it working with Windows XP. And it doesn’t – most of the time.

That said, I did discover a trick to get it working some of the time.

The manual (if you can call the little piece of paper containing instructions for other systems a “manual”) says that you should set your Hard Drive jumpers such that your drive is the “Master” device. I tried this with 3 different drives on 3 different computers, and it never worked. (For real.)

What DID work, though, was setting the drives to “Cable Select,” or “CS.”

Don’t ask me why, but this works, while setting the drive to “Master” doesn’t. I tried this with drives from three different manufacturers – a Western Digital, a Seagate, and an IBM made by Hitachi. Setting each of these drives to Cable select made the Kingwin work. (Sometimes.) But none of the drives would work when set to “Master.” Ever.

Go figure.

I’d be interested to hear if this solution works for you. If it does, let me know in the comments.

Here’s something else I’ve discovered about this Kingwin USB drive – when it does work, you can only connect it to your computer once before having to reboot. ONCE. Fortunately, I found a work-around for that, too.

How To Run Device Manager From The Windows Command Line

eddie — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:52:27 +0000

Microsoft went and hid the device manager.

It’s buried beneath at least 5 separate click events.

Fortunately, it is possible to run the device manager from the Windows command line. (That is, the box that pops up when you hit Start->Run.)

This should save you a lot of clicking around, particularly if you have to access the device manager frequently. (As I do, because my external USB drive doesn’t show up unless I disable then re-enable the USB Mass Storage Device service.)

How to run the Windows Device Manager from the Command Line or Start->Run prompt

Go to Start->Run.
Type “devmgmt.msc” (without the quotes) and hit “OK”
The device manager should now pop-up on your screen

How to Re-Mount a USB Drive in Windows Without Rebooting

eddie — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:46:20 +0000

I have a really crappy Kingwin USB external drive enclosure.

It doesn’t usually work.

When it does work, I am able to connect it to my XP computer exactly once. That’s right – after choosing to “Safely remove hardware” from the computer, when I reconnect the drive it isn’t recognized by Windows until I reboot the whole system.

What a pain the butt, right?

Fortunately, I was able to discover a workaround for this issue. In short, I use the device manage to disable then re-enable the “USB Mass Storage Device.” After doing so, my computer will find and recognize the drive without having to reboot Windows.

Here’s how you do it.

Open the device manager. You can find this by clicking Start->Control Panel. In the Control Panel, choose “System.” From System, choose the “Hardware” tab. There you will see a button labeled “Device Manager.” Click it.

(Or, if you don’t want to go through all the clickity-clack all over the place, just go to Start->Run and type “devmgmt.msc.” This should launch device manager.)
Under “Universal Serial Bus Controllers,” look for an entry called “USB Mass Storage Device.” Right click on this entry and choose “Disable.”
The Window will refresh, now, right-click on the same entry and choose “Enable.”
Turn on or connect your USB Drive. Windows should now recognize it.

I hope this works for you and saves you from having to reboot every time you remove your external USB drive from the system.

How To Block Websites

eddie — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:16:09 +0000

So you want to block your kids from going to certain websites, eh?

There is a lot of software out there that blocks websites, some of it good, some of it not so good.

There is a simple way to block websites on your home computer without installing any additional software.

To block specific websites on a windows computer, you only need to edit a single file on your system.

To block a website, say, Facebook, simply edit the hosts file so that DNS lookups for that website return 127.0.0.1. (A special IP address that resolves to your computer.)

Steps to block websites using the hosts file on Windows:

Open the hosts file for editing. This file is found in the “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc” directory. Browse there, and locate the file called “hosts”. Open this file for editing in Windows Notepad. Or, if you’d prefer, simply go to Start->Run and type notepad.exe c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add a line for each entry you’d like to block. For our Facebook example, the format will be “127.0.0.1 facebook.com”

Save the file. That’s it.

Voila! Now, when you try to go to Facebook.com in any browser, be it Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera — whatever — the browser will say that the website cannot be found.

Here is an example from IE7:

To unblock the website that you just blocked, simple remove the line from the hosts file.

Note: You may have to restart your browser or computer for the changes to take effect. Alternatively, you can try clearing your computer’s DNS cache by typing “ipconfig /flushdns” at the Start->Run command line.

Installing WebUI in uTorrent 2.0

eddie — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:55:38 +0000

Uh oh. The latest update to uTorrent broke its web interface, WebUI. After the automatic update, people are seeing only a spinning “loading” in the middle of the page.

I appears that the latest update is incompatible with older versions of WebUI.

No worries – here’s how to update it.

Steps to fix WebUI

Download the new WebUI files from here.

Rename the file to webui.zip

Copy the file to the uTorrent AppData directory. On Windows, it’s probably at C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME\Application Data\utorrent. Another way to find this directory is to go to Start->Run and type: “%AppData%/utorrent”.

Restart uTorrent.

Connect to the uTorrent Web interface and hit “ESC” to reset the interface.

I had a lot of trouble finding where to put the newly downloaded files. Thanks to Robard for the tip in the Eddie on Everything Forums!

Also, don’t forget the last step – if you don’t hit “ESC” to reset the interface, things won’t look right.

Fix the Synergy Copy-and-Paste Clipboard Problem on XP

eddie — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:55:51 +0000

I use Synergy to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers. (Or, I should say, I used to use Synergy – more on that later.) It’s really great software. If you’ve never used it, and you have multiple computers on your desktop, I highly recommend that you check it out. For a free package, it’s wonderful.

One major annoyance with Synergy, though, is that the copy-and-paste functionality sometimes doesn’t work from machine-to-machine. The problem is kinda random; I never have been able to track down the source. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’d looked for fixes in the past, but nothing seemed to stick.

Until today.

Today I discovered that someone has resurrected the Synergy project as Synergy+! (Synergy Plus). A group of programmers is actively developing the old Synergy code, and they have already ironed out a bunch of kinks, including that blasted cut-and-paste bug!

Big thanks, guys. I couldn’t be happier.

Download the new Synergy+ here, and your keyboard cut and paste problems will be no more.

How To Take A Screenshot Of A Movie In Windows XP

eddie — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:22:56 +0000

In Windows XP, taking a screenshot is usually as easy as hitting the “Print Screen” key. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for movie files. When you try to take a screenshot of a movie in XP, you just get a black box where the still image is supposed to be.

I use VLC as my general movie player – it’s a great freeware, open-source player that will play most anything you throw at it. It also allows you to take still-image snapshots of movies.

To take a screenshot of a movie, follow these steps:

Download VLC from here. (It’s open source & free)
Install, play your movie until you get to the image you want to capture. Pause the movie.
In VLC, go to Video->Snapshot
The snapshot will be saved to your “My Pictures” directory.

Voila- Video still frame captured!

By default, VLC will save the snapshot as a PNG file. So if you’re looking to post it to the web somewhere, you probably want to convert it to JPG format first.

The forum topic that inspired this post.

How To Force a Full-Screen Game To Run In A Window In XP

eddie — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:13:37 +0000

Man, nothing bothers me more than computer applications that insist on going full-screen in Windows. (OK, some things bother me more. But it *is* annoying.) This behavior seems to be prevalent in many computer games, and I can’t for the life of me understand why developers insist on abusing their users in this way. Hey people, I have a freaking GIGANTIC monitor with enough space to view many applications at once. Why should I have to devote all 26″ of my screen real estate to a game that can easily run in an 800×600 window?

Unfortunately, there is not always an easy solution to this problem. However, there are a few things you, kind user, can do to try to fix this broken-by-design behavior.

1. Try hitting “ALT-Enter” while the game or application is running. ALT-ENTER is a Windows key command that instructs an application to run in windowed mode. Depending on which game you are playing, this may work. (This is the easiest solution.)

2. Try altering the command line switch in the application shortcut to specify windowed mode. Here’s how:

Right click on the shortcut of the file and go to properties.
Go to the box that says “target.” It’ll look something like: “C:\Program Files\Warcraft III\Frozen Throne.exe”. Add the switch “-window” to end of the command. For instance, in the above example, it’ll then look like this: “C:\Program Files\Warcraft III\Frozen Throne.exe” -window
If adding “-window” doesn’t work, try adding just “-w”. (This works for some Sims games, like Sims2.)
If neither of those work, check the user manual to see if there is another switch that does work. If you find one, post it in the comments to help other people out!

For this method to work, the game developers must have specifically coded for this option. It will not work on all games.

3. Try using DXWNnd. There’s a program out there that’s called “dxwnd.” This program intercepts DirectX applications and forces them to run in windowed mode. I have had mixed results with this program – the colors don’t always render properly. Still, it’s worth a shot. To try this method, do the following:

Download and save dxwnd.exe
Right click the dxwnd’s window pane
Select “Add”
Use the “…” button to browse for your fullscreened executable
Select the DirectX version of your executable if it’s known, if not, leave it set to “Automatic”
If your executable runs in 256 (8-bit) colored mode, check the “Emulate 256 Color Palette” check box
Click “OK”
Now that you have an entry for your executable, simply double click it or run the game/application itself. What’s neat is as long as dwwnd is running, it will intercept the launching of the application itself, so it’s not necessary to use dxwnd itself to start your game/application

This is an old tool, and I was not able to get it to work properly on any of my games. I hope it works for you, though!

4. “Sizer” lets you automatically resize a window. Another option to try is the freeware Sizer application. Sizer allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size.

Download and install Sizer.
Run the program. It will appear in your system tray.
Run the program you want to resize. Hit ALT-TAB to show the Windows Start Bar. Right click on the Application and choose the desired size.

I was able to get Sizer to work on my Magic: The Gathering game, but not on Jeopardy: 2003.

5. Virtualization method: If the above fail, and you still want to run this application in a window, consider setting up a Virtual PC and running the application within it. To do this, you’ll need to download virtualization software like Sun’s Virtual Box, set up a virtual PC running Windows (Or OSX, whatever your poison :), then install the software into that virtual machine. This is by far the most complicated method and may not be for everybody. But it *should* work each and every time.

I had to use the VirtualBox method to get my Jeopardy 2003 game to run in windowed mode. If you are able to get any of your games running in windowed mode, post how you did it in the comments!

How To Delete A File That Is In Use By Another Person Or Program

eddie — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:18:42 +0000

Ah, the joys of Windows XP. Ever go to delete a file, only to be met with the annoying error message, “Cannot delete It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.” ?

This behavior is meant to prevent you from hosing things up by deleting files that shouldn’t be deleted. Unfortunately, while the safeguards work most of the time, there are sometimes glitches, particularly with network files and background applications. Sometimes, you are not able to delete a file, even though no other program is actually using it. In other cases, you don’t really care whether another program is using the file, you just want the file gone!

Of course, the first thing you should do is make sure you know what you’re doing. If you are sure that the file you want to nuke is not an important system file, or an important part of some software package, you have a couple of options.

One method of deleting locked files is to reboot your computer. When you restart your computer, you are killing all processes that might be using the file. This usually works. But not always. The downside of this method is that it can be annoying and time consuming to reboot your workstation.

Another method is to kill Windows XP’s “explorer.exe” process, delete the file, then restart explorer. To do this, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE to bring up Task Manager, then highlight “explorer.exe” and choose “End Process.” However, this method is not recommended: when explorer starts back up, your computer may not be in the exact state in which you left it. (For instance, you may notice that some icons are missing from your system tray.)

Fortunately, there is another way.

Unlocker will remove a file’s access restrictions that prevent your from moving, deleting, or renaming a file. The way it works is this: You install the program, and it runs in your system tray. Whenever you encounter the dreaded File is in use by another person or program message, Unlocker Assistant will pop up and ask you if you want to break the hold that some other application has on your file. You simply highlight the file you want to delete, hit “unlock,” and voila, problem solved.

Eddie On Everything » windows xp

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