Category: Geek Stuff

Microsoft Outlook has gotten a bad rap over the years. It’s a decent program that, as of now, no one has improved on. But millions of people use it on a daily basis. They use Outlook to store their email, organize their phone book, keep on top of pressing tasks, and store all their appointments. In short, Outlook is the electronic version of a personal organizer, and so people tend to lose their minds when something goes wrong with Outlook.

This guide is all about keeping Outlook running smoothly. It won’t help you when Outlook starts misbehaving – the whole point of this post if to keep that from happening in the first place. So if you’re a big Outlook user, read on and take the following advice to heart:

Get Rid Of Any Add-Ons You No Longer Need: There are thousands of “plug-ins” or “add-ons” for Outlook. There are plug-ins that allow you to synchronize Outlook data with your PDA or mobile phone, plug-ins that allow Outlook to download RSS feeds, plug-ins that find and remove duplicate emails, plugs-ins that let you organize mail in different ways that Outlook’s native paradigm, plug-ins that allow you to encrypt emails, plug-ins that send Event Reminders from your Calendar to an email address… the list is almost endless. Some of these plug-ins might cause security holes. Some of them might be poorly written and cause errors or reduce Outlook’s performance. All of them slow Outlook down and make the program use more RAM. So if you haven’t used a particular plug-in in a long time, get rid of it by uninstalling the plug-in via the Add\Remove Programs applet in Control Panel.

Remove Attachments: One of the handiest things about email is that you can attach files to emails. Likewise, one of the most irritating things about email is that you can attach files to emails. It’s great when someone emails you a desperately needed spreadsheet, but it can be annoying when a friend sends you an email with 20MB worth of vacation photos attached. Save the attachments to a folder and delete the emails to reclaim wasted storage space (and, if you’re using PST files, improve your performance). You can organize the email in your Outlook folders by size by right-clicking the “Arranged By:” bar at the top of each folder and choosing “Size”; by default, Outlook will show the largest emails at the top of the list. If you have several folders, you can right-click the main data store folder and select Properties > Folder Size; the box that pops-up will show the the size of all of your Outlook folders on that store, and you’ll be able to quickly find oversized folders and delete the attchments therein. Lastly, if you want to delete an attachment but save the original email, double-click the email to open it, then right-click on the attachment and select “Remove”.

Continue reading “Outlook Maintenance Guide”

If you’ve spent any time at all on Internet message boards, you’ve probably seen the same question asked over and over again. On computer message boards, a common question is “Why do the progress bars (meters) in Windows suck so much?” You’ve probably dealt with this yourself: you want to move a file from one hard drive to another on your computer, so you do the drag and drop thing, and Windows’ progress meter appears… “2 minutes remaining”. It then inexplicably jumps up to “38 minutes remaining” for a minute or two, then drops back down to “45 seconds remaining” before jumping back up to “1 minute remaining”. A similar thing sometimes happens when you’re installing software: the progress meter will slowly move up to, say, “38% complete”, and then stay there for a couple of minutes before suddenly jumping up to “75% complete”.

What’s the deal? Well, the snarky answer is that “your computer can’t predict the future”. The longer answer is the same, only slightly more involved.

Let’s say that you have a GPS system in your car. You’re sitting in downtown Charlotte, NC and want to drive to an address in downtown Atlanta, GA. You enter the address into the GPS unit, which immediately gives you an estimated drive time of 3 hours and 25 minutes (which is based the current distance you want to drive divided by 55mph). So you start driving to the address, and the estimated drive time slowly starts ticking down… “3 hours, 15 minutes remaining… 3 hours, 5 minutes remaining… 2 hours, 55 minutes remaining”. As luck would have it, there’s a massive wreck just outside of Greenville, SC. You’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and are doing around 2mph. Suddenly the estimated drive time jumps up to “16 hours, 47 minutes remaining”. As you creep along, the drive time keeps getting longer: “18 hours, 2 minutes”. You finally clear the wreck, and you figure that all the local cops are busy dealing with the accident… so you floor the gas pedal. Once you hit 125mph, the estimated drive time plummets to “45 minutes remaining”. Your road rage subsides after a few minutes, so you lay off the gas and settle in at a more reasonable 70mph. The estimated drive time is now back to a more normal “1 hour, 25 minutes”.

Continue reading “Why “Progress Bars” Suck”

Tracfone is America’s largest prepay-only wireless provider. They have good service and great rates for people like me that only talk around 30 minutes a month. Unfortunately, the phones they sell are a bit dated and decidedly low-tech. Their new Motorola w370 looks and feels an awful lot like the RAZR, but unfortunately, it’s crippled in a lot of ways. For example, the box advertises (heh – almost screams about) customizable wallpaper and MP3 ringtones. But, like all things in life, there’s a catch. Although the w370 has a mini-USB port, the phone’s locked, and the USB port doesn’t work. So to the Average Joe, the only way to get customized ringtones or wallpapers is to buy them through Tracfone’s website. The manual even says that explicitly: “Want cool wallpapers and ringtones? Go to Tracfone.com today!” Now, nothing I’m about to tell you is “illegal” or “immoral”… But it’s information that Tracfone usually isn’t very willing to give.

First of all, add the following addresses to your email address book:

myphonenumber@mms.att.net
myphonenumber@txt.att.net

where “myphonenumber” is your full 10-digit Tracfone number. We’ll need these addresses in a minute.

Continue reading “Tweaking Tracfone’s Moto w370”

One problem that tech support guys face – especially third-party types who go to different homes or companies – is that of reinstalling Windows XP on computers with different types of licenses. Some people buy retail copies of Windows XP at Best Buy or Office Depot. Some people get Windows XP preloaded on a computer from Dell or HP. Still others have computers provided for them by their employer, and that employer uses a Volume Licensing copy of XP.

The problem with all these different versions is that the CD keys for each version don’t work with any other version. So a Windows XP retail CD won’t accept an OEM license key. Likewise, an OEM CD won’t accept volume license or retail keys. And a volume license CD won’t accept retail or OEM keys.

So – does this mean that us tech support folks have to buy multiple copies of Windows XP just to reinstall them on their client’s computers? Not at all! You can easily tweak the SETUPP.INI file found on the XP installation CD to do two things: change what type of installation media setup thinks you have, and change what type of key your media will accept.

Continue reading “Tweaking SETUPP.INI”

In this post, I showed you how to create a shortcut that will allow you to log out of a Remote Desktop session and send the remote computer back to the desktop (XP’s normal behavior is to log you off, then leave the remote computer “locked”). Sadly, while this trick works with Server 2003 and XP, it doesn’t work with Windows Vista. Happily, I’ve just found out how to make it work with Vista… just right-click on the desktop and select New > Shortcut and type the following into the shortcut box:

tscon.exe RDP-Tcp#0 /dest:console

You then give the shortcut a name. From this point on, you can disconnect an RDP session by clicking on this shortcut, and the remote computer will exit RDP and return the remote machine to the console desktop. You must have admin rights on the Vista machine for this to work. And just for the sake of completeness, here’s the original command that’s compatible with XP/2003:

%windir%\System32\tscon.exe 0 /dest:console

Follow the same New > Shortcut procedure as above, and you can disconnect from an RDP session in XP/2003 and return the remote machine directly to the desktop.

I use Outlook 2007 at home. It has a lot of nifty features, but the new feature that I use most often is its built-in support for RSS feeds. I subscribe to a couple dozen RSS feeds, and I really like having the feeds delivered to my Exchange mailbox (which means that I can access them from anywhere using OWA).

However, on Wednesday I noticed that one of the feeds wasn’t being updated. I just shrugged it off, thinking the site might be having problems. But then other feeds stopped updating. I didn’t really notice this until today because when you subscribe to a couple dozen feeds, and when most of those feeds have 100 (or more) posts in a single day, it’s easy to lose track of which feed isn’t working.

I tried several simple fixes but none of them worked. So then I tried searching the Microsoft newsgroups and several other online sources. And while I could find several people having the same issue, none of the fixes they offered seemed to fix the problem. At this time, there doesn’t appear to be any “quick fix” for this issue. I did find a solution for the problem, but you’re not gonna like it:

1) Open Outlook and go to File > Import and Export > Export RSS Feeds to an OPML file. Choose a destination for the OPML file (I suggest saving it to your desktop), then save the file.

2) Click on Tools > Account Settings > RSS Feeds and highlight all your RSS feeds and press the DELETE key (or click the “Remove” button in the toolbar).

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have any feeds that are downloaded to a non-default location, you will need to manually copy the non-standard feed’s URL to a Notepad window BEFORE you delete the feed. Let’s say you have all your podcast RSS feeds delivered to a PST file, but the rest of your feeds are delivered to your Exchange mailbox. So BEFORE deleting the non-standard location feed(s), go to the properties of each one and manually copy the URL to a Notepad window.

3) Close Outlook.

4) Re-open Outlook and click File > Import and Export > Import RSS Feeds from an OPML file. Click the “Browse” button and select the OPML file you created in step 1, then finish the wizard.

5) Outlook will download any available feeds from your OPML list. Sadly, it will also create duplicate folders for your RSS feeds, like the “Feedname (1)” folders in the picture below:

6) Move the feeds in your “original” feed folders into the new “(1)” folders. Delete the empty folder from your old feed. Also, right-click the new “(1)” folder and rename it to the original name (if you’d like).

7) For any feeds that normally include attachments (like podcast feeds), you will have to manually add click the “Download attachments for this feed” in the settings for that feed under Tools > Account Settings > RSS Feeds.

8) If you have any feeds that were delivered to a non-default location (see the note in step 2), you will have to add these feeds back manually.

That doesn’t seem like a lot of work, but I can promise you that it is. It took well over an hour to get everything back the way I like it. I’ll see if I can report the “bug” to Microsoft on Monday. Given how many people this seems to be happening to, they’re probably aware of it and are (hopefully) working on a fix for it.

I don’t know how often this trick will come in handy for you system administrator types, but I “invented” it today whilst troubleshooting a problem for a client.

As you probably know, Remote Desktop lets you share your local printers with the remote computer that you’re connecting to. But did you know that you can share that printer on the remote computer, too? And if you share that printer any client on the destination network can print to your desktop printer?

I didn’t know it at the time. As I was troubleshooting something, it became obvious that I needed to try and print a document as part of the troubleshooting process. But I was at home and the user was in Charlotte. So I logged in to the company’s SBS server, shared my home printer off the server, then added that printer as a local printer on the user’s PC. I clicked File > Print and chose my home printer… and the document printed on my home printer!

This might be one of those “Well DUH! Didn’t you know that?” tips, but I thought it might come in handy!

Have you ever had a Firefox extension just stop working? I’m not talking about an extension not working properly after being updated, an extension that worked properly with one version of Firefox but doesn’t work after Firefox is updated, an extension that fails installation altogether, or an extension with some odd reproducible problem. I’m talking about an extension that worked properly for months, and then suddenly stops working without Firefox or the extension itself being updated. Say you’ve been using AdBlockPlus for ages, and one day you notice that ads are no longer being blocked and the AdBlock icon is missing from the toolbar and\or status bar. Neither Firefox nor AdBlock have been updated… it just no longer works!

It’s possible that the extension itself has become corrupted, but it’s more likely that Firefox’s extension database has become corrupted Here’s one quick and easy thing to try that just might fix this:

1) Make sure that Firefox is closed.

2) Click Start > Run and type the following into the “Run:” text box. Press ENTER when done:

%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

3) Click on your profile folder (it will have an odd name, such as “49g0xduq.default”).

4) Delete the following files: extensions.ini, extensions.cache and extensions.rdf.

5) Restart Firefox.

Firefox will rebuild those three files the next time your restart the browser. If this does not fix your problem, try uninstalling and reinstalling the extension.