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US Daylight Saving Time Ends Nov 7, 2010 – Windows XP Is Wrong

eddie — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:10:54 +0000

Confusing morning here at the On Everything household.

Half of my computers went ahead and adjusted themselves an hour back, presumably for the end of Daylight Saving Time. But the other half didn’t. I even had XP sync the time with a remote time server, but I was still seeing different times on different computers.

Not wanting to miss any football due to a clock error, I had to figure out what time it really was.

I did a little web searching and found that DST (Daylight Saving, or “Savings,” Time) doesn’t end until next week – Nov 7, 2010. But didn’t it always used to end before Halloween? I thought so.

Confusing matters more, it looks like today is indeed the day that Daylight Savings Time ends in the UK.

Here’s what I learned:

Through 2006, Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. ended a few days before Halloween (October 31). Children’s pedestrian deaths are four times higher on Halloween than on any other night of the year. A new law to extend DST to the first Sunday in November took effect in 2007, with the purpose of providing trick-or-treaters more light and therefore more safety from traffic accidents. For decades, candy manufacturers lobbied for a Daylight Saving Time extension to Halloween, as many of the young trick-or-treaters gathering candy are not allowed out after dark, and thus an added hour of light means a big holiday treat for the candy industry.

OK. Makes sense now.

Turns out there is a Windows XP patch that will fix the clock error with older versions of XP.

AcrobatInfo.exe is as bad as a Virus – How to remove it

eddie — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:16:43 +0000

I’ve noticed that my older laptop running Windows XP has gotten much slower when browsing files in Windows Explorer.

I did some research and found that every time I did anything within the Windows Explorer shell, a process called AcrobatInfo.exe was firing up, eating up system resources, and just generally slowing things down. The result was a lag of about 2 seconds whenever I moved my mouse over any document – not just PDF files. Any document whatsoever.

Seems that Adobe snuck this AcrobatInfo.exe file into one of its automatic updates, without asking. It slows down my whole computer. It runs when I’m not even using PDF files. If you delete the file, it magically comes back. Adobe doesn’t care that this thing is hosing up my whole computer, and that I don’t want it. If any other company did this it’d be termed malware or a virus. But because it’s Adobe, they somehow get a free pass.

This thing is a pain in the butt to get rid of, too. Thankfully, I found a step by step guide here.

In relevant part, you need to delete the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\21C0FC0AB3C24344FB30C34266AA5E09]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{98D9A6F1-4696-4B5E-A2E8-36B3F9C1E12C}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\AcrobatInfo.exe]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy\{AC76BA86-1033-0000-7760-000000000002}]

Change the value of these keys to false:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AcroExch.Document]
“BrowseInPlace”=-
[ HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\AcroExch.Document.7]
“BrowseInPlace”=-

And unregister the shell extension “service”

regsvr32 pathTo\pdfshell.dll /u

For me, the path to the PDFshell.dll file was :

regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\pdfshell.dll”

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 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.

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 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.

How To Watch Flash Videos Full-Screen on Dual Monitor Setup

eddie — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:08:05 +0000

If you have a dual monitor setup, you’ve probably tried to watch a flash video on one screen while working on the other. As you likely know by now, it doesn’t work – as soon as you click the mouse on the other screen, the Flash video snaps back to regular size. Pretty annoying, I know.

Fortunately, there’s a way around this. Polish blogger D.I.Z. has created a patch that will allow you to watch a full screen video on one monitor while working on another. The patch, a single DLL file, is available at his blog.

To install the patch, you simply download a single DLL file & replace the version on your system.

This hack should work in Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. And of course, if you upgrade your flash player, you will lose the changes. Bookmark this page so you check back for new versions of the DLL file needed for future releases.

Link to D.I.Z.’s blog.

Found at Lifehacker.

A Reddit thread on the matter.

How to Speed Up Your Computer Running Windows XP – Part 1

eddie — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:20:30 +0000

OK, so you’ve had Windows XP for a while now and have installed a bunch of third party apps, and Windows just keeps getting slower, and slower, and slower, and slooooower…

It might be Microsoft’s fault, since there are a bunch of things that XP should do differently. It might be a third party application provider’s fault for installing a bunch of junk into the startup folder that you didn’t ask for. It might be your fault for carelessly installing software that contains spyware or adware.

But we’re not here to point fingers. The purpose of this article is to help you get your computer back up to speed.

Before I begin, let me tell you how I personally keep my Windows machines running at top speed — I completely reformat the C: drive and reinstall everything, starting with Windows XP, every few months. Yes, this can be pretty time consuming, though I’ve worked out a few tricks that really speed things up. If you really want to get back to top performance, this is the best course of action. However, this solution isn’t for everyone – you should have some clue as to what you’re doing before taking this route.

If you want to speed up your current system without reformatting, give these steps a try:

Clean up your Desktop

For some reason, having large files on your Desktop slows Windows down. (Don’t ask me, I didn’t design it.) You should try your best to store your documents somewhere else, for instance, in your “My Documents” folder.

Having a lot of icons on the Desktop can slow windows down as well, which is why Windows ships with a “Desktop Cleanup Wizard.” You may have noticed that an annoying little bubble pops up from time-to-time saying “You have unused icons on your Desktop” This isn’t Microsoft trying to be helpful by unlcuttering your screen for you, this is them working around the “too many icons slows me down” design flaw.

If you’d like to use the Desktop Cleanup Wizard, access it by right-clicking anywhere on your Desktop then choosing “Properties.” The “Display Properties” window will appear. Choose the “Desktop” tab, then click the “Customize Desktop” button at the bottom of that screen. From that screen, choose the “Clean Desktop Now” button.

Of course, there is really no need to run the wizard – you can accomplish the same by simply deleting the icons that you don’t use manually.

Free Up Disk Space by Removing Temporary Files

Start Microsoft’s “Disk Cleanup” by going to
Start –>All Programs–> Accessories–> System Tools–> Disk Cleanup
-or–
Go to Start->Run and type “cleanmgr”

If prompted to choose a drive, select “C.”

Disk Cleanup now examines your drive for a bit, then shows you how much disk space you can reclaim by deleting unused files. When the box pops up, you will probably want to choose to get rid of

Downloaded Program Files
Temporary Internet Files
Microsoft Error Reporting Temporary Files
Recycle Bin
Any “Log” Files

Do NOT choose “Compress Old Files” — while this will free up some disk space, it will also make your computer much, much slower.

Anything else, it’s really your call. In my list, I see that “Office Setup Files” are taking up about 200M of disk space. While I could reclaim that space by deleting them, I choose to keep them in place since it makes some tasks in Microsoft Office a little bit easier. And since I’m not really hurting for disk space, they really don’t bother me.

Hit “OK” to let XP reclaim some disk space then move on to the next step.

Defragment your Hard Drive

Start-> All Programs-> Accessories-> System Tools-> Disk Defragmenter
–or–
Click Start->Run and type “dfrg.msc”

Choose the C: drive from the list and then click “Analyze.”

The tool will now analyze your hard drive and tell you whether the drive needs to be defragmented. If so, follow the instructions on-screen. (You may want to bookmark this page now — your computer may need to be rebooted by the defrag program. Hit “CTRL-D” to bookmark.)

Note: Depending on the size of your Hard Drive and level of fragmentation, this step might take a few hours to complete. You will still be able to perform other tasks while the program runs, though.

Check Your System for Malicious Adware

If you don’t already have Lavasoft’s Ad-aware installed on your computer, you need to download it and install it. What this program will do is search your system for malicious programs that may be running in the background and disable them.

The software is free and can be obtained from download.com or in the free Google Pack. To get Google Pack, which contains a bunch of other software as well, click the button below.

(Note: Google Pack is completely customizable. Just de-select any software that you don’t want.)

After installing Google Pack, run it by finding the appropriate file in the Start Menu. Be sure to choose to “Check for updated definitions” if prompted.

Once the definitions have been updated, choose “Start” to start the scan. Once the scan is complete, choose to have any detected adware files quarantined or removed.

Get rid of Spyware

Like adware, you may not even be aware that spyware is running in the background on your computer. The best spyware detection tool out there is called Spybot Search & Destroy and can be downloaded by clicking here.

Download and install the software, the run it by locating the appropriate menu under Start->All Programs. (Likely called “Spybot Search and Destroy”)

When you run the program, you will need to first choose “Search for Updates,” after which you may need to re-start the program. Then choose “Check for Problems” and let Spybot S+D quarantine any problems found.

Run a Virus Scan

This is going to vary depending on the virus software that you use, but you should start your virus scanner, update the definitions, and run a full system scan.

If you don’t have virus software, or if you are looking to make a change, note that Norton Antivirus is included in the free Google Pack. You can download the Google Pack by clicking the button above.

Do you have enough RAM?

RAM, or Random Access Memory, is what your computer uses when it “thinks.” The more complex tasks you perform, the more RAM you need. And if your computer doesn’t have enough, Windows can run like a dog as it tries to make up for the RAM deficiency by caching to disk. Most bargain-basement computer manufacturers keep their costs down by selling PCs with too little RAM – those of us “in the know” know that simply popping an extra RAM module in can speed up performance drastically.

To check the amount of RAM that your computer has, hit the Windows Key and the Pause/Break key at the same time. (Or right-click on “My Computer” then choose “Properties.”) The amount of RAM That you have will be listed on the bottom right side of the box that pops up. If you have under 512M, and if speed is an issue for you, you’re going to want to seriously consider upgrading to at least 512M of RAM or more. It shouldn’t cost you more than $50, and the performance increase will be considerable.

Coming in Part 2

This ends Part 1 of the “How to Speed up your PC” article. In Part 2 I will discuss more advanced techniques, such as disabling certain programs that run at Startup and deleting Tasks in the Task Scheduler. Until then, Good Luck and happy tweaking!

Eddie On Everything » xp

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