Saturday, March 20, 2010

Changing the Time Server in Windows

Has your Windows not been keeping up? It could be because the windows time server it is trying to sync with is getting overloaded. To change your time server follow these steps:
1. Right-click the taskbar clock and choose Adjust date/time.
2. Click the Internet time tab, then the Change settings button. (This might be a little different in Windows XP.)
3. Erase what's in the Server field and replace it with pool.ntp.org.
4. Click Update now. In a few seconds, Windows' clock should get synchronized.
5. Click OK, then OK again, and you're done.

Sunday, March 07, 2010

ITunes Error: iTunes Library file cannot be saved.

This error can be caused by several different misconfigurations. You should check each of the follow (in this order). I had one that bugged me for 2-3 weeks on a new Windows 7 Professional installation that turned out to be #3 on the list. Hope this helps!

1. Make sure you are a local Administrator on the machine. A lot of times in Domain (or networked) environments the Network Administrator will not make the domain account a local administrator.
2. Make sure you have full rights (read and write) to the iTunes Music folder. It would not hurt to change the owner permissions to yourself as well.
3. If iTunes has ever had a problem in the past updating the library (maybe because of #1 or #2 above or any other reason) it will write the change out to a *.TMP file in the iTunes Music folder (same place the library file is stored). Until you reboot in Safe Mode and delete these *.TMP files you will continue to get the error. (Note: I had 30 of these files on the machine I had the issue with)
4. Change the shortcut to "Run as Administrator".

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

How to remove all but the most recent restore point

System Restore is a great feature, but all those restore points can take up a lot of space on your hard drive. It's easy to get rid of them all - just disable and then re-enable System Restore. But what if you want to keep your most recent one, just in case? Yep, there's a way to do that, too. Here's how:
1. Click Start | Run.
2. In the Run box, type CLEANMGR
3. In the Select Drive dialog box, choose the partition where the restore points are located.
4. On the More Options page of the Disk Cleanup dialog box, click the Clean Up button.

This will delete all the restore points except the most recent one and free up space on your hard disk.