Well, it’s official. That someone who messed up the family’s desktop computer is also the same person who decided to use the TV we have for a second output. It’s understandable, that since we have an NVIDIA GeForce 5200, that also has a S-Video output, we would go out of our way to use it to output videos to the TV when the DVD player was getting repaired. But we thankfully got it back last night from the shop and have reconnected it to the TV, allowing for the troubles to start.
The first thing that happened when we booted up the computer was the fact we saw a large distorted version of the wallpaper that we had for a background on the one monitor, and no output on the other monitor. The first thing we did was try to check the properties of the NVIDIA card, and then the desktop properties, to try and repair what happened. When neither of these worked, my dad tried hooking up an old CRT monitor to the computer to try and simulate the TV. However, that didn’t work either.
What ended up working, after he went to bed was my solution. I booted up into Safe Mode by hitting F8 (as we all should know), and did the following:
- Booted into Safe Mode
- Went to the Device Manager
- Removed the NVIDIA driver
- Rebooted normally and reinstalled NVIDIA’s driver
At the end of all this, I still wasn’t done yet. For some reason unknown to me, the clock had reset itself to January 21, 2006, and I’m not someone who will leave a computer in unworking condition if it’s possible to fix it. So I went poking around, trying to sync the time with time.nist.gov and time.windows.com, both are respectfully the default time synchronization sites. When neither worked as expected (both actually threw up errors about the size of data it had to download) before looking online for a solution.
Believe it or not, there were a decent amount of sites that claimed that the Windows and NIST sites that Windows normally synchronizes the internet time with, were down or removed. I was able to find a very easy solution to the problem though, and that was to changed the Internet Time Settings to update from time-b.nist.gov which worked fine.
Puzzling was the fact that there was little mention of the bug in official Windows documentation. It made me puzzled to say the least, but perhaps MS isn’t aware of the bug either. If you try time-b.nist.gov and get the same error you did before, perhaps you might want to take a look at this site which lists a fair amount of time servers to help you set up your time, even if you don’t live in their time zone. In fact, the one I named is in Maryland, USA, but I’m in Atlantic Time in Canada! So that proves their usefulness without living there! Hopefully these two tidbits of information will come in handy for others in the future, and hopefully you won’t have to go looking all over for solutions to unusual problems!
