Take Office Starter with You

An Office Starter To-Go device allows you to use your Office Starter programs on another computer. The device is a USB flash drive that you configure by running the Microsoft Office Starter To-Go Device Manager while the device is plugged into your computer.

When the device is configured, you can plug it into another computer and run your Office Starter programs on the other computer, regardless of whether Microsoft Office is already installed. When you unplug the device, Office Starter is removed from the computer.

The other computer must be running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), 32-bit version, or Windows 7. Read on… via Take Office Starter with You.

SBS 2008/2011 Time Running 10 Minutes Fast?

Seems the time server on one of my SBS 2008 systems decided to run 10 minutes fast this past week. After resetting the time, it proceeded to run 10 minutes fast again.

Looks like its not just me, as stated in the Microsoft TechNet forum.

Ok. So let’s fix that, shall we?

To query the time service about its current status open up an elevated command prompt and type in: w32tm /query /status

This will display the following output (it will either be: Local CMOS Clock or time.windows.com)

I wanted a reliable time server and found the pool.ntp.org. As the name implies ntp.org is the home of the Network Time Protocol open source project. Members work together to provide a public pool of time servers for use by individuals and businesses. Because the servers operate in a large network of pooled resources the time servers are highly redundant and reliable.

There are several pools of NTP servers for you to choose from based on what part of the world your server is located. Select your region from the list in the link. http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/NTPPoolServers

Clicking through you’ll see that in North America, there’s us.pool.ntp.org, ca.pool.ntp.org, mx.pool.ntp.org and so on with 609 active servers in the pool. In Europe there’s a pool for every Country as well with 1386 servers total.

Here’s how to change your time server from what ever it is now to another NTP server. I’m going to use us.pool.ntp.org in my example.