Technomummy

Posted By technomummy on February 24, 2010

A few funny Outlook problems lately – both very frustrating, but easy to fix.

Problem 1 – Outlook won’t start

A user couldn’t start Outlook, he wasn’t clear about the error he was getting. Tried creating a new mail profile and that did fix it, but he had settings he wanted to keep in the old profile, rather than recreating it. The end fix turned out to be:

1. Click on Start Menu, go to Run.

2. Type (without quotation marks)  "OUTLOOK.EXE /RESETNAVPANE"

3.  Voila! Problem is fixed, this command resets the navigation pane back to defaults and lets Outlook start. All that is lost are customisations to views.

I have since seen this posted as a fix for “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook, Unable to open the Outlook window. The set of folders could not be opened. The server is not available. Contact your administrator if this condition persists.” at http://forums.techguy.org/business-applications/544134-cannot-start-microsoft-office-outlook.html 

Problem 2: No Address Book

I had another user who was adding names to the Address Book in a brand new clean install of Outlook 2007, but then going into a new mail and clicking the To button showed no names. Double-checked that entries did in fact have email addresses, all good there. Easy fix:

1. In Outlook, go to Tools – Account Settings.
2. Go to the Address Book tab.
3. If this is the same problem, there will be nothing listed. Click New.
4. Add an Additional Address Book, Outlook Address Book, and all should be good!

This easy fix made a 90-year old user very happy

Category: Outlook, Problem | No Comments »
Tags: Office 2007, Outlook

Posted By technomummy on September 17, 2009

This error occurred when upgrading a virtual machine image that was about six months old, so I don’t know exactly which one of the many updates I applied to it caused the error. The error occurred when I tried to go to Central Administration, telling me that my web.config file had an error on line 16:  “Unrecognized attribute ‘type’”.

A quick google led me to Chris Zhong’s blog, and she very succintly detailed the fix – in IIS manager, go to the Properties of the website, and on the ASP.NET tab change the ASP.NET version from 1.1 up to 2. Voila! Fixed.

So thanks Chris, this was exactly the problem. What did we do before Google?????

Category: Sharepoint, Tips | No Comments »
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Posted By technomummy on August 14, 2009

OK, so first of all this was the extremely frustrating “an unexpected error has occurred”…. So, first to get a more useful error:

This error was coming up in Sharepoint’s Central Administration page, so first locate  the config file for this site:

1. Right-click My computer, select Manage. Then go to Services and Applications, and select Internet Information Service.
2. Open the Web Sites group, and find the web site giving this error. Right click, choose Properties, go to Home Directory tab. The local path then shows you where the config files are located.
3. Go to that directory, and open web.config, edit as follows (take a backup first!):
   • Change as follows: find  SafeMode MaxControls=”200″ CallStack=”false” , change it to SafeMode MaxControls=”200″ CallStack=”true“
   • Also change CustomErrors mode=”On” to “Off“

OK! So now I could see my actual error message, which went something like this:

The SiteMapProvider ‘SPXmlAdminContentMapProvider’ cannot be found.

So back to web.config – a search for SPXMLAdmin found nothing…. so I located an old copy of this file, and copied this in just before the </providers> </sitemap> tags:

<add name=”SPXmlAdminContentMapProvider” siteMapFile=”_app_bin/admin.sitemap” type=”Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPXmlContentMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce11e9429c” />

And voila! Central Administration back up and running. Note that I assume that my Public Key Token is unique to my install, and you would need to use the PublicKeyToken from your other web.config entries.

Category: Sharepoint | 1 Comment »
Tags: Sharepoint

Posted By admin on August 5, 2009

This has happened now with the last two iPhone updates – running the update from iTunes re-locks the phone! After an update, the symptoms are:

• The iPhone goes into Emergency mode – it shows the USB cable graphic on the home screen, and will only allow emergency calls.
• In iTunes, the iP{hone is recognised, but iTunes asks you to put in a valid SIM before you can do anything with it.

Here’s how to fix it:

• First, you will need redsn0w, the jailbreaking app
• You will also need the IPSW file for your current firmware version and the bootloader files, all of which can be downloaded here

The run redsn0w, and follow the prompts! The only trick is that redsn0w 0.8 will not recognise the IPSW for 3.0.1, but you can just use the 3.0 IPSW instead. Some good step by step guides are here and here.

NB: you can use redsn0w to just unlock the phone, you don’t have to install Cydia or Icy if you don’t want to. To just unlock the iPhone for use with other networks, just untick the boxes for Cydia and Icy, and tick the box for Unlock in redsn0w.

Good luck!

Category: iPhone | No Comments »
Tags: emergency, iPhone

Posted By technomummy on June 20, 2009

Noticed this evening that for some reason my audio suddenly went kaput – volume icon in the system tray was showing with a red X though it, saying “no audio device detected”. A quick look around in Device Manager showed the audio driver not listed, and Scan for new hardware detected nothing. Tried many options (like downloading the drivers from the Dell site, they wouldn’t install because – you guessed it – no audio device was present!). Booted into the Dell Utility Boot, audio tests failed with a message about timeout while waiting for the adudio controller to generate an interrupt…..

Here’s what (finally!) fixed it:

1. Reboot and go into the BIOS setup
2. Disable the onboard integrated audio and continue to boot into Windows with no audio
3. Reboot
4. Go into BIOS setup again end now enable integrated audio, and presto! sound works perfectly.

Category: Vista | No Comments »
Tags: audio, hardware, Vista, Windows

Posted By technomummy on June 18, 2009

Extensive googling got me as far as relating this problem to the display settings. Specifically. right-click on My Computer and go to the Advanced tab, then click on the Settings button under Performance. The option for Smooth-scroll list boxes has to be ticked for Live Preview to work, either explicitly as part of Custom Settings or as part of Adjust for Best Performance. So far so good – however, I found that whenever I changed these settings, they were not held, so that next time the user logged in the display settings reverted back and Live Preview was unavailable again.

Then came the hard work – was it set in Group Policy? No. Was it possible to fix it using Group Policy? No. Was it possible to nail down the registry settings involved? No. Googling pointed me to some settings, but I still couldn’t get a handle on how to force these settings every time the user logged in.

Finally, the answer – it’s not a server-side setting at all, it’s set in the RDP client! Specifically, in the connection settings for the Remote Desktop client, go to Options and the Experience tab, and make sure that Menu and Window animation is checked!

And voila! Enable Live Preview is checked in Office 2007 using Remote Desktop to a terminal server!

Category: Excel 2007, Office 2007, Server 2003, Terminal Server, Word 2007 | 4 Comments »
Tags: Excel 2007, Microsoft, Office 2007, RDP, remote desktop, Server 2003, Terminal Server, Word 2007

Posted By technomummy on June 14, 2009

If I ever win Tattslotto, this is my new desk…. 

It’s the Aura from PoeticTech, and comes with optional components such as a cup holder and a coat hook….. it’s on my Christmas List!

Category: Fun | No Comments »
Tags: gadgets

Posted By technomummy on June 13, 2009

Using Excel to work on large spreadsheets can get confusing, when you scroll down to the bottom of the page – and lose your headings as they scroll off the top! Here’s the solution – it’s called “freeze panes”. In Excel 2007:

• Go to the View tab on the ribbon.
• Click on the Freeze Panes button, and you’ll see three options:
  1. Freeze Panes: this will “freeze” the rows above and columns to the left of the current cell. So say your sheet has two rows of headings (that’s rows 1&2), and one column of names down the left hand side (that’s column A). So you would click on cell B3 and choose Freeze Panes. This would keep rows 1&2 and column A always visible, no matter which way you scroll.
  2. Freeze Top Row freezes the top row, obviously, and
  3. Freeze First Column freezes the leftmost column.

Note that each of these options also has a little picture next to it, showing which rows/columns will be frozen:

The Freeze Panes menu dropdown

And that’s it! Now your spreadsheets can be as big as you like, and you’ll always be able to see your row and column headings.

Category: Excel 2007 | No Comments »
Tags: Excel, spreadsheets, Tips