Grupenet

Being a new Mac switcher, I of course found myself installing Windows using Boot Camp so I can run those couple applications that are only available in the Windows world. The first time I booted out of my Boot Camp partition and back into Mac OS X I noticed my time had been offset by about 5 hours. After a bit of googling I found that Windows uses a different time scheme and thus changes the internal hardware clock every time I boot into Windows which ends up screwing up the time displayed in Mac OS X the next time I boot into it.

I found a quick and easy little hack on how to fix this problem thanks to a commenter on this blog post.

First, boot into your Boot Camp partition. Open up Notepad and copy and paste the following:

@echo off
net time /setsntp:tick.usno.navy.mil
net stop w32time
net start w32time

Save this as a .bat (batch) file. Now find your saved batch file and drag it into your “Startup” folder in your Start menu. Now every time you start up Windows, it will fix the time offset automatically.

On a side note, sorry for the very long delay in posts lately.

I’ve been using Windows Vista since it was first released and have enjoyed using it much more than XP. Almost all the applications I use daily work on Vista without many problems. But there’s one exception, and it’s iTunes. Even after the many updates Apple has released since February, nothing has seemed to fix the constant problems I have with iTunes. The best way to describe the problems I am having is with pictures.

This is what I am greeted with every time I launch iTunes. I have to resize the window to get the interface to show up correctly.

Then after I have been listening to music for around half an hour and I go back to the iTunes window to change the song the interface goes completely whack and is sometimes even unresponsive to me clicking the close button.

Now I know it’s a bad idea to even be using Vista. But I got the Vista Business Edition for free from a campaign Microsoft ran. I’m getting really fed up with the crappy Vista support in iTunes and hope my experience is better on my Macbook once I purchase it.

So Apple, when are you going to fix iTunes for Vista? It’s been out for half a year already. It takes that long to fix a few bugs?

The first time I booted into Vista I was very disappointed by the boot screen. Luckily there’s a quick and easy way to enable a much more visually appealing boot screen in Vista called “Aurora” that is not enabled by default. Here’s what the Aurora boot screen looks like and a quick how-to on enabling it.

Firstly, open your start menu, type msconfig into the search box, and press enter. In the window that pops up, go to the “Boot” tab. Check the box next to No GUI boot and Make all boot settings permanent. If you do not check “Make all boot settings permanent”, Windows Defender will bother you each and every time you boot into Windows.

You’re done! Just restart your computer and you should see a much better-looking boot screen.

Here’s just another example of how terrible Internet Explorer 6 is. Using one line of HTML code, you can crash IE6. This little gem was found by a Japanese blogger by the name of Hamachiya2. The code needed to crash IE6 is as follows:

<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input>

Luckily this bug has been fixed in IE7. Firefox, Safari, and Opera are also all immune to this line of code. Please use this code for good and not evil!

Windows Live Messenger is a great instant message client and is very feature-rich. This may be all fine and dandy, but there’s just one problem with Live Messenger: the advertisements! Thankfully there’s a quick and easy way to remove the ads by blocking access to rad.msn.com, which is the server hosting all the ads. This can be done by editing your hosts file.

First of all, you will need to find your hosts file. This can be found in the folder %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc. Just copy and paste that into your address bar in Windows Explorer and you’ll automatically be taken to the correct directory.

Once you’ve found your hosts file, right-click on it and select “Properties”. Now uncheck the box next to “Read-only” and click OK. Open this file in WordPad or Notepad. Whichever you prefer.

Add the following to a new line at the end of the file: 0.0.0.0 rad.msn.com

Save the file and restart Windows Live Messenger. There should be no advertisements in either the main window or message windows.

Sorry for the long delay in posts. I was busier than a bee this week.