An old joke says that there are three kinds of lies; black lies, white lies and the internal polling data of political parties. The latter example is typically statistics, and while statistics can be presented in such a way as to prove almost anything, raw, unprocessed statistics are a great tool.
One of my habits when troubleshooting troubles is to have a look at the event viewer. While event viewer allows you to see specific events, it can sometimes be difficult to see trends. In Windows XP, we don’t really have a choice, we’ll have to look through the data, and parse it ourselves.
Enter Windows Vista, and Windows Reliability Monitor. As the screendump below shows, it will show you, as a graph, when things have started to deteriorate. You can look through the history, and see on what days there have been many errors. It also gives you a reliability index rating, from 10 to 1 (Ten being very good, 1 being exceedingly bad. Coupled with event viewer logs, Reliability Monitor makes it that much easier to read logs, and solve problems.
Every so often, I reinstall my computers. One of the biggest hassles of this, is installing all the software I use. I recently discovered a simpler way to do so; Ninite. You simply go to the website, check the boxes for what software you need, then download the installer.
Having downloaded the installer, you start it, then leave it to its business. It automatically downloads and installs all the software you have specified. That’s it. You’re done!
The list of software isn’t terribly long yet, but they are adding new software all the time.
Are you worried about printing too much? No? I’m not really, either, but from time to time, I’d like a somewhat simpler way to print parts of a huge document, or create a PDF from them. Normally, to make a PDF, you’ll need some kind of distiller software.
GreenPrint is a program that does exactly what I want it to; it allows me to select certain pages within a document, and I can choose what printer to send the print to. You can also create a PDF, right from the program, of whatever pages you want.
I use a lot of different software, and I am always looking to try out similar software to see if I can find something better. However, finding an alternative to, let’s say Sony eBook Library, isn’t always as easy as one would like.
One problem I can see right now, is that it doesn’t always display relevant hits. Still, it’s a lot better than the hit-and-miss that you get if you don’t try a lookup.
I recently had a user drop by and ask me about an odd error he was seeing when starting Microsoft Outlook. The error looked like this:
Looking about on the internet, I couldn’t find a lot of help, and enlisted the assistance of a friend of mine. After some trial and error, we found that the problem lay with the navpane, and that the solution was to reset it. Here’s how:
Open a command line window (Start – Run – cmd)
Enter this command: cd C:Program Files (x86/x64)Microsoft OfficeOffice12outlook /resetnavpane
After Outlook has opened, it should open like normal from the desktop icon. Also remember to use x86 if you’re using a 32-bit version of Windows, and x64 if you’re running the 64-bit version.
If you have a problem opening Word documents from the Windows Explorer, the problem probably lies in how the document files are registered with the operating system. The first thing to try in correcting the problem is to unregister and reregister Word with Windows. From the command line, use the following command:
The quotes are necessary, but you may need to change the path so it reflects the location of the winword.exe file on your system. (You can use Windows’ Search tool to locate the path to the winword.exe file.) The /unregserver switch “unhooks” all the references to Word in the Windows Registry. You should then, immediately, use the following command:
Wrapping up my series on eBook usage, I provide you with a list of handy links for legal download of books for your eBook, as well as other links that might prove useful:
I had a user call in about a rather wordy error message whenever she’d save a file for the second or more time.
"This file contains repairs made to it by Word. Saving the file will make these repairs permanent. It is recommended that you view the repairs before saving the file."
I had a hunch this was related to the template file normal.dot, so I ran a search for it, deleted all instances I found, and restarted Word. When Word the rebuilt the normal.dot file, the error was gone.
When a Windows computer crashes, it will, if possible, write a minidump-file (filetype *.dmp) to the hard drive. These files are usually located in %SYSVOL%\Minidump, and they are usually called something like Mini042809-01.dmp. The problem with these files is that they are not exactly easy to read; here’s a small extract of my last minidump:
Luckily, Microsoft has made a set of tools to help us decrypt them. Debugging Tools for Windows are available for most versions of WindowsSimply download, install, and enjoy.
After installing the toolkit, and the symbolset that follows my install of Windows, the minidump is readable, and the conclusion is found at the end, and can look something like this:
Over the last year or so I’ve had at least fifteen users complain that when they double-click an Excel document in Windows Explorer, Excel opens, but no workbook. They then have to open the document manually in Excel.
Here’s how to resolve this problem:
Open excel, then open a blank workbook
Go to Tools -> Options -> General
Remove the check mark from the box marked “Ignore other applications”
An old joke says that there are three kinds of lies; black lies, white lies and the internal polling data of political parties. The latter example is typically statistics, and while statistics can be presented in such a way as to prove almost anything, raw, unprocessed statistics are a great tool.
Having downloaded the installer, you start it, then leave it to its business. It automatically downloads and installs all the software you have specified. That’s it. You’re done!
I recently had a user drop by and ask me about an odd error he was seeing when starting Microsoft Outlook. The error looked like this:
2009 STFU && RTFM