Look for IT over here

Do you have a lot of email clogging up your inbox and have trouble organizing it all? I’ve found this great (and best part free) plugin for Outlook that does it all for you.

It’s called Xobni, and works with Outlook 2003/2007 on XP and Vista Operating Systems.

One of the many features it has is when you open an email, the Xobni sidebar will show you all related emails from the sender, how many emails you send receive the them, and even a trend graph of what time you get emails from him/her.

That is one of many. Check out the Youtube video below for a tour of this plugin:

Got a call from mate the other day. His laptop running Vista appeared to be stuck installing an update (which we later worked out to be SP1), and continuously rebooting. The laptop was displaying ‘installing 3 of 3′ which didn’t really tell him too much.

The fact that he wasn’t even getting into windows severely limited his options on what he could do. Even trying to boot into safe mode was having the same result.

After a bit of searching around on the internet, I found a solution to his problem. And it looks like he’s not the only person that has experienced the exact symptoms.

Here’s what he did:
(Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for any unexpected results of following the steps outlined below. You do so at your own risk, but if you do have the same problem as my mate, then you really don’t have much option other than to try it)

1) Boot from the Vista install disc
2) Choose your language, time etc and select the “Repair your computer” option.
3) Start a command prompt and delete/move the following file.
C:\Windows\winsxs\pending.xml. You can just move it elsewhere on the computer if need be.
4) Restart the PC, you’ll get the same ‘configuring updates’ screen but after a while it will carry onto the desktop.
5) Turn off automatic updates and create a restore point. Wait until MS fixes the update.

Hopefully after that your PC will will be working normally again.

Please post any comments on success/failure stories.

Netstumbler is a great program for detecting Wireless Access Points, and more importantly, the signal strength. It’s a must-have program that every tech/nerd should have.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in Microsoft Vista - but there is an alternative. It’s called Vistumbler. personally I haven’t tried it, but friends of mine say it looks and feels very simialr to the ‘original’.

Running P2P applications in Vista and ever see this message coming up? In your event viewer, the exact wording is ‘TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts’.

Microsoft has implemented a change in the TCP/IP stack since XP SP2 to limit the number of ‘half-open’ (incomplete/syn packets) connection attempts per second to keep your computer from being used by dangerous programs such as worms that scan the internet to infect more systems.

I stumbled on this feature(?) only today as I don’t use Vista. Fortunately, if your P2P applications are suffering, there is a patch. You can download it from here.