IT Troubleshooters

If you do need additional ring time before voicemail:

A) The simplest method is to call your carrier and request a longer ring time, up to 30 seconds.

B) If you have a GSM based phone, some have had success by dialing this number from your phone: **61*XXXXXXXXXXX**30#

Replace XXXXXXXXXXX with the number of your carrier voice mail center (find it by looking at your Phone Dialer > Options > VoiceMail > Access Number. Put your access number in place of the Xs above.
For example, the Vodafone uk voice mail access number is 121, and thus the string to dial would be **61*18056377243**30#

Replace the 30 at the end of the string with your desired seconds. For most carriers, 30 seconds is the longest allowed.

Microsoft has released a Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox through its “Open Source Lab”. It looks like this is just another part of Microsoft moving its focus to media from controlling the window to the Internet.

In any case, this should be useful for users of Windows Media Player that are so efficiency-obsessed that they need to control their music through their favorite web browser.

When reminders appear in Microsoft Outlook and click Dismiss All I get the error message “Cannot turn of reminder. You may be reminded again. The end date you entered occurs before the start date. Dismiss operation failed.”

First, try launching Outlook.exe with the “cleanreminders” command line argument:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE /cleanreminders

If that does not work, carry out the below steps to delete the items in Reminders folder:
Download MFCMAPI tool from http://support.microsoft.com/?ID=291794

1. Run MFCMAPI on the desktop
2. Go to Session->Logon and Display Store Table
3. Select your profile
4. Right click Mailbox and choose “Open Store”
5. Expand “Root Container”
6. Right click “Reminders” and select “Open Contents Table”
7. New Window Launches with Title Reminders
8. Select all the reminder items listed there, Right click and select “Delete Message”
9. Close MFCMAPI

Whenever you send an email to someone in Outlook, it will add that person to your nickname cache for quicker access in the future.
If that person’s address changes, especially if that person is on your domain, you may find their old email address pops-up as a suggestion when you start typing in the person’s name in the To:, Cc: or Bcc: fields of a message. To clear your nickname cache so this doesn’t happen, follow the steps below.

Note: This will not affect your Global Address list or any of your contacts list. This merely deletes the cache which pops-up suggested email addresses when you start typing an address in Outlook.

1. Quit Outlook.
2. Start Microsoft Windows Explorer.
3. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options, and then click the View tab.
4. Under Advanced Settings, click to select the Show hidden files and folders check box.
5. Click OK.
6. Click Start, point to Search, and then click All files or folders.
7. In the Search Companion box, type *.NK2 in the All or part of the file name box: box.
8. In the Look In box, click to select your local hard disk.
9. Click Search.
10. Right-click the .NK2 file with the name of the profile that you want to reset, and then click Rename.
11. Rename the file to profilename.bak, and then press ENTER.
12. Quit Windows Explorer.
13. Restart Outlook.
Outlook will generate a new nickname cache.

When you delete the unwanted items from each folder, it moves them to the Deleted Items folder, which is in the same file. You must delete the items from the Deleted Items folder to permanently delete them so that Outlook can compact the file.

The compacting process does not remove all the free space from the file. It leaves either 16 kilobytes (KB) or 4 percent (%) of the file size (before compacting) whichever is greater.

To be compacted, a .pst or .ost file must meet the following requirements:
The file must be 16 KB or larger.
The file must have at least 16 KB of free space since the last time that you compacted it.
You can start the Outlook file compaction manually, or run it automatically in the background.

How to Manually Start PST Compaction
On the File menu, click Data File Management.
Click to select your Personal Folder, and then click Settings.
On the General tab, click Compact Now.
Click OK, and then click Close.

How to Manually Start OST Compaction

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
Delete any items that you do not want to keep, and then empty the Deleted Items folder.
On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
In the list, select Microsoft Exchange Server, and then click Change.
Click More Settings.
On the Advanced tab, click Offline Folder File Settings.
Click Compact Now.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and earlier versions of Outlook
On the Tools menu, click to select E-mail Accounts.
Click View or change existing e-mail account, and then click Next.
Click Microsoft Exchange Server, and then click Change.
Click More Settings.
On the Advanced tab, click Offline Folder File Settings.
Click Compact Now.
When the compact operation is finished, click OK twice.
Click Next, and then click Finish.

Microsoft has released a technical preview of Office 2010. This is a pre-beta release intended for feedback, as well as promotion, so it’s not feature-complete and may change before the final release planned for the first half of 2010.

It does offers a rough guide to what Microsoft is planning for its ubiquitous office suite. The short summary is ‘more of the same’ more of the controversial Office Ribbon UI, more features for products that arguably have too many already, and more integration with SharePoint so that users are drawn deeper into Microsoft’s platform.

At the same time, the company is looking perhaps nervously at web-based Office suites from Google, Zoho, Adobe, and others and responding with Office web applications of its own, while carefully avoiding any suggestion that they might replace the desk-bound versions.

The big themes of Office 2007 were new XML-based document formats, which sparked a ferocious standards war, and the disappearance of menus in favour of a fat-tabbed toolbar called the Ribbon. Web apps aside, there is nothing so radical here. Office 2010 feels more like a refinement of the earlier version. The Ribbon is now extended to Outlook and Publisher. One crumb of comfort for Ribbon-haters: a “customise the Ribbon” option has appeared, letting you add and remove tabs, groups, and individual commands.

As for Open XML, it’s notable that Microsoft neglects to mention it at all in its Reviewer’s Guide, even though this is supposedly the release that will fully implement ISO/IEC 29500. To be fair, few users ever cared about XML formats themselves it is only when documents get scrambled or fail to open that such things become important.

So what is new here? 64-bit versions for a start. They’re now an option throughout. The most obvious use is gigabyte-size Excel spreadsheets, though working with any large document should now be easier. Excel also gets a new single-cell chart type called a Sparkline and a new Slicer tool for filtering data. Some features turn up throughout the product. The 64-bit version is the Office 2010 Professional plus version.

The Office Button – really a file menu, and one which some new users find hard to discover in Office 2007 – has been replaced by a Backstage view, combining file, preview, and document options into one full-window dialog. It sounds odd, but it works well. Paste Preview is another new feature, showing an instant preview of Paste actions.

Ideal for product reviewers, a screenshot button lets you insert an image of any open window into the current document. Several Office applications now support simultaneous multi-user editing, provided the document is hosted on SharePoint or Windows Live.

I have been trying to remove the SMS Advanced Client from a Windows XP machine using Ccmclean tool (Ccmclean tool can be found in SMS toolkit). But unfortunately, it failed to remove the client by using Ccmclean.

There is another method to remove the SMS Advanced Client from the machine which is msiexec /x command.

Before executing that command, you must know what is the GUID for the SMS Advanced Client, the GUID value can be found inside the Registry editor under following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

The correct GUID has SMS Advanced Client as the Display Name value.

After you get the SMS Advanced Client GUID value, execute the msiexec /x command at command prompt.

Msiexec /x {D8EF2D11-47CF-45E5-B423-47B29706DE12}
(the value behind Msiexec /x indicate the GUID of SMS Advanced Client)

After you execute the Msiexec /x on the machine, you may need to manually remove the VPCache folder for SMS Advanced Client. Below is the step by step how to complete the task:

1. Locate the following registry key in registry editor:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SMS\VPCache

2. The Path value for VPCache is the location of the VPCache folder on the system drive. For example, %Windir%\System32\VPCache.

3. Locate the VPCache folder and then delete it from the hard drive.

4. Lastly, delete VPCache registry key from the registry editor.

Although this method need to spend more time to complete it, but it is a alternative for you to remove the SMS Advanced Client from the machine.

The Blue Screen of Death, or more properly the ‘Windows stop message’ occurs when Windows detects a problem or error from which it cannot recover. The operating system halts and diagnostic information is displayed on a blue screen. In newer versions of the operating system, the contents of the PC’s memory are dumped to a file for later analysis.

All Windows XP stop errors are numbered according to the circumstances that caused the error, which assists enormously in troubleshooting them.

A typical Windows XP stop message, is divided into four parts, and actually does display some helpful clues as to what caused its appearance. Reading a BSOD is not an everyday task, but if we take a moment to dissect it, you’ll see it can help us to resolve the conflict which is stopping Windows from operating correctly.

The bugcheck information shows the number of the stop error (in hexadecimal format), information on why the system has stopped and the friendly (text-based) name for the stop error. A typical one is DRIVER_IRQI_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.

The second section, ‘recommended user action,’ is pretty generic and contains advice for the user on possible troubleshooting steps. This tends to be the same for just about every stop error, though the main advice ‘try restarting your computer’ is the best possible first step to take.

The third section, ‘driver information,’ may contain vital info. If an actual driver file is associated with the blue screen, it will be listed here. This can give you something to work on in the case of a reoccurring error.

The final part of the stop error screen is the ‘debug port and status information’ section. Windows XP will attempt to dump the contents of system memory either to a file on the hard drive or to one of the COM ports in the case of a stop error.

There is a number of ways to trouble shoots this common issue on the blackberry and can sometimes be an easy fix and other times it can take a few troubleshooting steps.
When the BlackBerry user attempts to send a Messageing message it fails immediately. A red X appears and the following error is received. Some times it can be that you are not able to send or receive emails and no error shows.
The error could be caused by one of the following:
The BlackBerry user is attempting to send a message without having a data plan.
The service book is currupt.

Resolution
To correct this issue follow the steps below:
Some times perfoming a hard rest of the device can solve this issue.
Verify that the BlackBerry has a Data Plan.
Delete and resend the Desktop CMIME service books in Options > Advanced Options > Service Book.
Perform a hard reset on the BlackBerry.