Neil.B.Ennis – Page 15 – Technical Musings

Outlook 2003 Runs like a Dog

by Neil.B.Ennis January 25, 2007 No Comments Shortlink

I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with the amount of CPU time consumed by MS-Outlook 2003 on my laptop.

When Autoarchive runs every morning at 9am, the system grinds to a halt. There’s no way in Outlook you can change the TIME at which this process runs. So my solution to the problem is to disable Autoarchive, wait till midnight, enable it, and tell it to run every day. That way I won’t be around while it’s archiving. How stupid that I have to stay up till midnight because MS products don’t work properly. Does anyone know any better solutions to this?

The other contributing factor is my archive folders. I have them visible in the folder window that appears on the left hand side of outlook – so I can see “Mailbox – Me”, “Personal Folders”, “Archives” etc down the left hand side. I thought this might be slowing things down a bit, so I right-clicked on the Archove and Personal Folders, selected “Close”, and the folder disappeared from view. After I did this, Outlook seemed to consume less CPU time, so I think I’ve solved this problem.

One final thing that might be adding to the overall slowness is the fact that my main outlook mail folder connects through a VPN to my exchange server (i.e. its not local to me). I think the combination of VPN and Exchange might be using up a lot of CPU.

Surely there must be something better?

Harrdware Mobile Phone

It Works!!!!

by Neil.B.Ennis January 12, 2007 No Comments Shortlink

Ben Tatasciore and his team at Fone Zone Strathpine are legends.

I complained to Ben yesterday about my poor experience with Telstra and he solved my problem. Basically the upgrade to a 3G sim card broke my messagebank service, and Ben helped me navigate the labyrinth of Telstra to find an intelligent lifeform that was able to “Re-provision” my phone and get my messagebank working again.

Thanks for the excellent service, Ben.

Special thanks also to Anthony at Telstra who flipped the right switches and made the right incantations to get it all working for me.

As an addendum to my report about MyPhoneExplorer that I mentioned yesterday, another nifty feature is that when it’s connected to my computer, and I receive an incoming SMS, it pops the SMS up on my compuer screen. Plus when someone calls on the mobile while its connected to the computer, a popup flashes on the screen to tell me someone is calling, and it tells me who the caller is.

I am a very happy customer now!

Harrdware Mobile Phone

It’s a Sony :)

by Neil.B.Ennis January 11, 2007 1 Comment Shortlink

I love my new Sony K800i mobile phone.

I can email, take photos, videos, browse the net, watch Fox-Tel, listen to the radio and use it as an MP3 player. Mine came with a 500mb memory stick, and a nifty little adapter so you can plug the stick into your laptop.

I have two gripes:

GRIPE 1. The softwae that comes with it is useless. This bloatware is almost 50mb to download. It fails to install, with heaps of DLL errors. Gives errors when you uninstall it, blurts out wierd pop-up messages in chinese when I reboot my machine, and renders the phone unusable when connected to the laptop via USB.

SOLUTION 1. A FANTASTIC program called MyPhoneExplorer – it’s free, only 2mb in size, installs with no problems, does everything the Sony software pretends to do and more, and is easy to use. It even has a great utility where you can use your computer keyboard to navigate around the phone rather than pressing the small keys on the phone. If you download it and like it, don’t forget to send a donation to the author. He accepts paypal.

GRIPE 2. Telstra. It took 18 hours to get my new 3G Sim Card activated. While they were doing that, by messagebank service died. I tried phoning them 4 times, each time on the phone for 30 to 40 minutes. On 3 of those occastions they cut me off after 30 minutes.

SOLUTION 2. Any suggestions? I won’t touch Optus with a barge-pole because they’re majority owned by the Singapore government who has the nasty habit of executing people by hanging. I don’t know anything about Voda, 3 or AAPT. Telstra is sort of like an alcoholic uncle. You don’t like him very much, he does nasty things, but you’re worried if you swap him for someone else’s uncle you might end up with someone even worse.