Month: June 2008

Over the years, people have levelled thousands of complaints against Microsoft Outlook. To Microsoft’s credit, they have listened to their customers, slowly but surely fixing bugs and interface annoyances over the years. However, a few of these “annoyances” remain, and none is more annoying to some people than the “Business Fax” number being listed in the Outlook Address Book.

Here’s the issue in a nutshell: if you open a new email in Outlook and click the “To:”, “CC:” or “BCC:” buttons on the email, you’ll be presented with a list of email addresses and “Business Fax” numbers from the selected Address Book.

For most people, these “Business Fax” numbers just get in the way. If they’re sending out a mass email, they can’t just select all the addresses in the list, as sending an email to a Business Fax address makes Outlook (and\or Exchange) throw a hissy fit. And it’s easily to accidentally click on “Bob Smith (Business Fax)” instead of “Bob Smith (Email)” and end up sending Bob… nothing.

You might ask why Business Fax numbers even appear in the Outlook Address Book in the first place. That’s because many companies have fax servers – a computer with one or more fax modems installed. Instead of walking across an office to a fax machine, you can simply send a fax over your local network to a fax server, which then sends it out. Microsoft Exchange (and other third-party software programs) have integrated fax servers with Outlook, so if your company has Exchange and a fax server, you can easily fax someone simply by creating a new email, addressing it to a “Business Fax” address, attaching a Word or Excel document (if desired) and sending it on to Exchange, which then forwards it on to the fax server. It’s quite handy, actually.

But for people that don’t have a fax server, it’s a pain to have to sift through fax number when sending an email. Thankfully, though, there’s a simple workaround: just put a letter (any letter, although I use “F”) in front of any “Business Fax” number entries (e.g. change Bob Smith Enterprise’s “Business Fax” entry from “704-555-1212” to “F704-555-1212”).

This will prevent the “Business Fax” numbers from appearing in the Address Book, but you will still be able to view the numbers in Outlook’s “Business Card” view (and, as you might guess, you can also see the information by opening the Contact).

Are you one of those people that always seems to download files to his or her desktop? If so, are you also one of those people that lets files and folders build up on the desktop, such that on a bad day you have 100 icons cluttering your desktop?

If so, you might be interested in a free program called Desktop Teleporter. You basically install this little app and define a set of file types and destination directories for those files. Desktop Teleporter then sits in the background and periodically moves any matching files to the destination you set during setup. For example, you could set all .JPG files to be moved to your “My PIctures” folder, and Desktop Teleporter would move all pictures saved on your desktop to the “My Pictures” folder every few minutes or so.

Desktop Teleporter is free and works with most flavors of Windows.

From the “better late than never” department:

If you’re one of the last people that prefers IE 6 to IE 7, you might want to tread carefully when it comes to installing SP3 for Windows XP on your computer.

If you have IE 7 installed before the SP3 upgrade, you will not be able to go back to IE 6 once SP3 is installed. According to this article, this is “because the service pack includes newer versions of the old browser’s files. If Microsoft had allowed users to revert back to the pre-SP3 version of IE6 – the one saved on users’ PCs when they upgraded to IE7, and what was used until now to back out of the newer browser – Windows would have ended up in a ‘mixed file state’. This state is not supported and is very bug prone. To ensure a reliable user experience, [Microsoft] prevent[ed] this broken state by disabling the ability to uninstall Internet Explorer 7”.

If you want to retain the ability to uninstall IE 7 from your computer, remove IE 7 before installing SP3, then reinstall IE 7 once the Service Pack update is complete.

Have you ever wanted (or needed) to have one of your technically-challenged friends download a file via BitTorrent? It can be a huge pain, because that friend would need to install a BT client, go to a tracker and download the torrent file, and then seed it to completion. Hell, a lot of my “less than technical” friends can’t even wrap their heads around BT lingo, much less actually download stuff.

This is where Torrent2Exe comes in. You upload a torrent to the site (either via direct URL or from a local torrent) and the site packages the file along with a lightweight BT client. All the end user has to do is download (and execute) the packaged EXE file… really folks, BT just couldn’t be any easier!

If you like the desktop animations provided with Windows Vista, but aren’t ready to trash Windows XP just yet, you might enjoy a handy lil’ freeware app with a strange name: Lebendig. Lebendig adds Vista-like animations to program windows in Windows XP. You can have windows fade in and\or out, spin in and\or away, or lots of other nifty combinations.

I really like this lil’ app, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to play well with Outlook 2007. Once you start Lebendig, minimizing Outlook causes the app to “disappear”. You can try to maximize it again (and you’ll briefly see the full-screen Outlook window), but then the Outlook window will simply “disappear”. The only way to get it back is to use Task Manager to kill OUTLOOK.EXE and start the program over again (but remember, you can’t minimize it again!). Also note that I’ve only seen this behavior with Outlook 2007 – other programs seem to work just fine with Lebendig (although I’ve only tested the few apps that are on my system).

I like Lebendig – I just wish they’d fix that Outlook bug.

This post over at istartedsomething.com talks about a (possible) groovy new feature in Windows 7: built-in support for virtual hard drive (VHD) files.

VHD files are the “virtual hard drives” used in Microsoft’s virtualization software, like Virtual PC and Virtual Server. Normally, one installs Virtual PC on a Windows XP or Windows Vista computer, then generates a VHD file to act as a “virtual hard drive” for a virtual computer. You then install Windows XP, Windows Server, or whatever operating system you need on that virtual hard drive. You can then boot up the virtual machine and use it exactly as you would a “real” computer.

Adding native support for VHD files means that you could boot directly into a VHD file without having to run Virtual PC on the computer. This would allow you to run VHD computers at “native speed” without first loading a host OS. Even better, you could have multiple virtual hard drives on a system: you could have a “work” virtual hard drive (with Office, QuickBooks, and whatever else you need to do your job) as well as a “play” virtual hard drive (with games and music files). And if Microsoft’s talk about Windows 7 is to be believed, you could even optimize the “play” VHD for gaming by giving Windows 7 the smallest possible footprint.

There are also huge implications for system administrators, too. With Windows 7, an administrator might be able to make an VHD image using Virtual PC, then push that image out to corporate desktops so that everyone is using the same desktop computer image. Now that would be cool!

Any thoughts about this?