Ever found that Outlook (in particular 2003) will close with errors with that annoying window?

Most of the time if you restart you won’t have any problems but you would like to know what caused it, and how to stop it happening again.

Fortunately you don’t have to look for a program on the net to but, download and install. Your have the solution on the computer right now.

On you PC there is a program called scanpst.exe.

It is generally located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\SCANPST.EXE (or somewhere very similar - if you can’t find it search for the file in Windows Explorer).

Simply run the file and follow the prompts. You will be advised if any problems have been found and asked if you want to fix them. Sometimes you will have the program twice.

Hopefully that will solve your problems.

WTF? Here’s a cool project I found that uses one of those slimline USB keys and a USB cable to make a cool and unique USB drive that you hopefully won’t lose.

There’s no real point to doing this other than to kill some time customizing your computer gear. It certainly look unique. Here’s the link with the full set of instructions.

Having used VMWare to build virtual OS systems on one PC (mainly for testing applications), I wondered if there was a open source (and free) equivalent.

I found VirtualBox. It looks to do exactly the same thing as VMWare, and can be installed on a variety of platforms. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

I haven’t yet tried it but would be interested in any comments or opinions from anyone that has.

Wordpress 2.5 has recently been released. It is a major update to previous releases, and I must say it has a nice feel to it. But I nearly didn’t get to enjoy it….

I realise how important it is to backup your wordpress install (and database) should an upgrade not work.

Here’s what happened:

I upgraded via fantastico, and for the last few updates, I haven’t bothered backing up my data etc because I’ve never had problems.
When I loaded up my site, yeah it looked fine. But when I tried to go to my admin panel, a message (shown below) came up:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare activate_plugin() (previously declared in /home/username/public_html/wp-content/plugins/installer/includes/functions.inc.php:69) in /home/username/public_html/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php on line 116

What the? After asking my friend Google what he problem was, it appears to be the ‘installer’ plugin that was causing the issue. I FTP’ed into my plugins and renamed the installer folder - which in effect made it treated like a new plugin (by Wordpress), and thus deactivated. I was then able to get into my admin panel and carry on as normal.

The moral? Keep regular backups of your Wordpress installation and SQL database, as well as deactivate all your plugins prior to upgrading.
Also, backups are fine, but have you ever tested doing a restore?
Another thing to keep in mind is that I decided to try and use the backup tar file that fantastico auto generates when updating. Guess what? the file was corrupt

A common way to lock your computer (assuming you are running XP) is to hit the Windows + L key simultaneously.

But what if you don’t have a Windows key on your keyboard? There are a couple of other ways to do it:

My choice is to create a shortcut on your desktop as you will probably use it over and over. Right click on an empty area of your desktop and click on new>shortcut. Enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation and click on next, name your shortcut and click finish. That’s it.
If you want to change the icon, right click the shortcut and go to properties>shortcut>change icon. Browse to the moricons.dll in your system32 folder to see a large number of cions to choose from.

A quick and dirty way to achieve the same result is clock on start>run and enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation in the command dialog box.

If you have fast user switching enabled, another way is to bring up task manager, click on the shutdown menu, and select switch user. Same result.