Daylight Savings Time Update for Windows 2000

Posted on February 3rd, 2007 in Uncategorized by Jay

The United States government has changed the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The theory is energy will be saved by starting earlier and ending later. Of course our computers don’t know that yet. Unless you fix it, your computer’s clock will be off by an hour when you wake up on March 11th.

If you have a computer running Windows XP or later you’ll be fine if you just go get the patch for your OS from Microsoft. If you have Windows 2000 you have to do it the hard way, unless you have Extended Hotfix Support. Windows 2000 is no longer supported by Microsoft, but they do provide a long knowledge base article to tell you how to do it yourself.

Fear no more. I needed to simplify the process so it can be repeated on hundreds of machines. I’ve wrapped it all up in one self-extracting zip file and I’m sharing it with you. DSTUpdate.exe was created with ZipGenius and if you want to check my work feel free to look inside and check it out.

Make the Windows 2000 Registry Repair Utility into a Bootable CD

Posted on January 13th, 2004 in Uncategorized by Jay

In September Microsoft released the Windows 2000 Registry Repair Utility at their downloads site. The utility fills a void in my software toolbox I’ve been trying to fill for some time. There are ways to boot into the recovery console and fix the registry but there’s never been an easy way and they often don’t work. This utility has already saved more than one computer I administer.

The instructions provided with the utility require creating six Windows XP Setup Floppy Disks and then running an installer that copies some files to the sixth disk. To run the program you need to boot from the floppy drive and successively insert each disk until you get to the last one. The program then asks which installation to fix and hopefully fixes it.

I wasn’t satisfied with loading six floppies to get the job done. My toolkit only includes one blank floppy. Everything else I need is kept on CDs. If I need a bootable floppy I have images on a CD that I can load to the floppy as needed. So I set out to figure out how to move the utility to CD.

Dual Boot Windows 2000 and Ghost

Posted on November 4th, 2002 in Uncategorized by Jay

For some time now, I’ve been using Norton Ghost to make perfect backups of my computers. The one thing about Ghost that gets old, is you have to boot up to DOS with a floppy disk or CD-ROM in order to make the backup. In addition to requiring a boot floppy, I keep my BIOS set to only boot to the hard drive so I don’t accidently boot up a floppy and risk infecting my computer with a virus.

I decided to figure out how to dual boot Windows 2000 and DOS so I can boot up to DOS on the hard drive and run Ghost without popping in floppy disks and changing BIOS settings to allow the computer to boot to the floppy.

Recovering From a SYSTEMced Error

Posted on October 16th, 2002 in Uncategorized by Jay

Note: This procedure has been superceeded by the availability of the Windows 2000 Registry Repair Utility. Please see my tip on how to make it into a bootable CD and try it before you try this tip.

The Windows 2000 SYSTEMced error occurs when the system can’t load the SYSTEM hive of the registry. The reasons include the SYSTEM hive being damaged, missing or too large to load.

The cause I’ve experienced most often has been the hive being too large to load. The SYSTEM hive has to share 16 MB of memory with several other processes when it is first read so if the hive is 16 MB and the other processes take up 3 MB it just can’t be read. Microsoft has instructions for recovering from a hive that gets too large in knowledge base article Q269075. However, I’ve never been able to recover a system using only the method they specify. Microsoft assumes that the SYSTEM hive is too large because there are a large number of shared resources and their fix is to eliminate the key of the hive with the shares in it.

Cleaning up after Internet Explorer

Posted on March 28th, 2002 in Uncategorized by Jay

Internet Explorer leaves pieces of information from browsing all over the place and doesn’t clean up after itself when you’re done browsing. Whether your concerned about privacy or just don’t like having all the garbage lying around, this one’s for you.

You use this script at your own risk. I am not a programmer. I just occasionally hack together code that gets the job done. If this script should happen to go wild and hose your computer you’ve been warned.

CleanExplore.vbs

This script replaces launching IE directly. Instead CleanExplore launches IE and watches it. When IE exits the script wakes up and deletes Typed URLs, Cookies, the Cache and History files. It will not remove any index.dat files or any subfolders that are not empty.

Installation:
Copy this file anywhere you like. If IE is not in the standard location change the strIEPath variable below. Replace your IE shortcuts with shortcuts to this script. Rename them to Internet Explorer for transparency and change the icon to the big blue E.

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