Alan Le

Outlook 2007 Beta 2 Nag Dialog Box

This dialog box appears everytime you open Outlook 2007 Beta 2.

Download or Remind Me Later? How about Never or something like the checkbox in IE 7 Beta that says "Do not display this message again.. LookOut works just fine in the beta so no thanks. Also what if I wanted to use Google Desktop search instead?

It's almost as annoying as the windows update reboot reminder.

Windows XP Customizations

Today's post includes some of the small tweaks that I do when I personalize and customize my Windows XP environment. Of course all of the changes are up to your personal preference. Here are some of the Windows options that I change.

Taskbar and Start Menu Changes
These changes are to remove some of the clutter on on the Start Menu and to allow quick access for certain tasks.

1. Right click the windows taskbar, and select properties
2. Uncheck the "group similar taskbar buttons" checkbox
3. Click on the Start Menu tab and click on the Customize button
4. Depending on your screen resolution, I usually up the numbers of programs to display in the start menu to 8 as I like knowing the programs I use regularly.
5. Click on the Advance tab
   • Control Panel - display as a menu
   • Enable dragging and dropping - checked (default)
   • Favorites menu - unchecked (default)
   • Help and Support - unchecked
   • My Computer - Display as a link (default)
   • My Documents - Display as a link (default)
   • My Music - don't display this item
   • My Network places - unchecked
   • My Pictures - don't display this item
   • Network connections - display as connect to menu (default)
   • Printers and Faxes - unchecked
   • Run command - checked (default)
   • Scroll Programs - unchecked (default)
   • Search - Unchecked
   • Set Program Access and Defaults - Unchecked
   • System Administrative Tools - Display on the All Programs menu and the Start menu
6. List my most recently opened documents - Checked

Folder Options Changes
I find it quicker to scan files and get to them using the details view over the default thumbnails view.  It's also helpful to know the extensions for the files that I using.

1. Open Windows Explorer by using the Windows Key - E or going to the Start Menu/Accessories/Windows Explorer
2. From the View menu, select Details
3. From the Tools menu, select Folder Options
4. Click on the View tab
5. Under Hidden files and folders, select the Show hidden files and folders radio button
6. Uncheck the hide extensions for known files types checkbox
7. Click on the Apply to All Folders button and click Yes to the confirmation message box.
8. Click Ok to finish

Enabling Remote Desktop
Throughout the day I may use several computers and my need to quickly access one or another.  Remote Desktop is also great for logging in from home through VPN.

1. From the start menu, Right-click My Computer and select properties
2. Click on the Remote tab
3. Check the "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer" checkbox

Disabling the Windows Indexing Service

1. Go to My Computer
2. Right-click your hard-drive and select Properties
3. In the General tab, uncheck the "Allow Indexing Service to index this drive for fast file searching"
4. Repeat if you have more than one drive.

Change your desktop resolution

1. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and select Properties
2. In the Display Properties window, click on the Settings tab
3. Modify your screen resolution to your like or to your monitor native resolution.
4. If you're using a CRT, you might want to set your monitor to a higher refresh rate to prevent it from flickering.
   • From the Settings tab, click the Advanced button
   • Click on the Monitor tab
   • Change the Screen refresh rate to something higher than 60 Hertz that your monitor supports.

Are there any additional tweaks or changes you that you do when personalizing your desktop? I'd love to hear about them.

Lookout! It's Outlook Search.

Checking and finding information from emails are a daily rituals for any workplace. Too bad that the built-in search tool for Outlook 2003 is slow and doesn't return relevant results. To quickly find information from my old emails, I've been using a third party plug-in that, which was bought by Microsoft, called LookOut.

A search for "Vertigo Blogs" using LookOut returned 317 matches sorted by relevance in less than 1.5 seconds!

Here's the same search using Outlook's built-in search engine that's been running for more than a minute. It returned 3484 items sorted by date recieved.

Note that Google Desktop and MSN Desktop search will also search emails through Outlook, however I feel that these desktop search applications are a little bloated and like the single task simplicity of LookOut.

More Firefox Extensions Goodness

I would like to follow-up on my last post about Firefox extensions. In setting up Firefox, I installed these extensions.

Adblock Plus - Powerful extension to get rid of ad images and banners while browsing.
Adblock filterset.G Updater - Companion extension to Adblock that adds premade filters.
IEView Lite - Simple extension to right-click the current page and view it in Internet Explorer.
Web Developer - Great extension for every web developer. With this extension you can quickly view the site layout, tweak the css, and useful things.
Del.icio.us Buttons - Makes adding new del.icio.us links quick and simple.
Tab Mix Plus - fine tunes the tabbed browsing experience. The built-in session manager is quite useful as well.

What are some of your favorite extensions?

Royale Theme for Windows XP

One of the things I do everytime I set up my windows environment is install the Royale Theme for Windows XP. The changes are subtle and adds some gloss to the vanilla Windows XP Luna theme.

Hover over the image to see the orignal Luna Windows XP theme.

Close up of the start button.

Edit: Fixing the images. The Community Server blog enginge messed up my dynamic css.

Firefox's Live Bookmarks are Del.icio.us

I've blogged about the wonder that is del.icio.us a few months back. Today I want to share a power tip about using del.icio.us with Firefox's Live bookmarks.

Firefox provides the ability to bookmark any RSS feeds just as you would bookmark a URL. The cool thing is that when you bookmark a RSS feed in Firefox as a live bookmark, it will automatically updated for you when the feed contents are updated. No extensions neccessary. By using the live bookmark feature, you can have up to date bookmarks wherever you browse with Firefox. Here's how.

Once you have links saved on del.icio.us, you can access them by going to del.icio.us with your username and the tag for the specific set of links you've saved. For example, to find all the bookmarks for items you've tagged as "toread" the url is http://del.icio.us/username/toread where username is your username. To add the live bookmark to a del.icio.us page, click on the orange RSS icon in the address bar and select "Add 'RSS feed ...' as Live Bookmark." Click Ok to create the bookmark in Firefox. You can create as many live bookmarks as you like. No more clumsy storage of static bookmarks in the browser that's tied to the machine.

I keep all of my links on del.icio.us and depend on it for the convenience of organizing and accessing my bookmarks. When combined with Firefox livebox, this feature is one I can't browse without. In fact, my live bookmarks from del.icio.us are always readily available in the firefox toolbar.

There are some drawbacks in using del.icio.us with Firefox, though. If and when del.icio.us is down, I can't access any of my bookmarks. This isn't too bad as del.icio.us have been really reliable, although slow at times, and the times that it was down I don't have internet access anyway. The second drawback is that the favicons for the links are not saved between firefox sessions since the links are dynamically created, which is merely a minor annoyance.

There's an extension called Foxylicious that will store your delicious tags as bookmarks in Firefox. I don't use this extension as I like to pick and choose which live bookmarks I can quickly access.  This reminds me another firefox extension that I use to add the del.icio.us browser buttons available at http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension.  Just follow the instructions there for installation.