I’m usually not very interested in desktop modifications, at least not on Windows. I need my computer for productivity first and eye candy second or third, so I just don’t have the system resources to spare, given how poorly Windows often runs, anyway. That said, this is amazing and sorely tempting me: How To: Roll [...]

Ever send an email without the attachment? You go on and on about what’s in it, then never send the file. I’ve done that. No more; now there’s the Outlook attachment reminder macro. Easy to install, and I just verified it works.
Hat tip: lifehacker.

After writing my last post, I discovered what may be another sure thing: unpredictable failures to work by Windows. Our printer is networked; it sits downstairs, connected to an old laptop, and we print everything to it over the network. It has been working fine. Well, okay, it’s been a little flaky for a few [...]

Techmeme linked me to this amazing Bill Gates e-mail rant. It’s gratifying to know that even the creator of the operating system finds it infuriating, especially when it just took me 10 minutes to reconnect my old laptop to my 802.11g (WiFi) network. I mistyped the WEP key, allegedly, either in the first box or [...]

Alright, all you Windows geeks: I need help. I tried to implement a backup script that uses a number of Microsoft tools. I keep getting errors that look like this:
ERROR: Selected writer ‘ASR Writer’ is in failed state!
- Status: 7 (VSS_WS_FAILED_AT_PREPARE_BACKUP)
- Writer Failure code: 0×800423f4 ()
- [...]

If you are not familiar with the “Paste Special” options in Word, you should read this article. If you are already familiar with it, but find it frustrating that there’s no shortcut, you should definitely read this article. Paste Special Unformatted Text At Your Fingertips. Enjoy!

I receive a lot of newsletters as HTML email messages. For obvious reasons, I want to view the images in those messages, so I tell Outlook 2007 it’s okay to download the images from site somesite.com. The problem is that Outlook will download some images from a site, but not others. For example, http://www.somesite.com/image1.gif might [...]

Outlook 2007 has started doing something maddening and stupid in the last couple of weeks. When I am looking at my Inbox and receive new mail, the item count at the bottom of the window and the unread message count in parentheses in the mail folders list update, but the mail isn’t listed in the [...]

I recently installed Office 2007 on my new computer. Dubious judgment call, maybe, as it is bug-ridden as any other Microsoft product, but it was $25 at the campus store. Anyway, I rapidly found that spellcheck and, sometimes, grammar check didn’t work, at all. The below example, of a new document being checked for the [...]

I recently found a major obstacle to going Microsoft-free. I could switch to Linux, if I had the time to fool with it, at the moment, but it appears I am stuck with Microsoft Word, still. While I really like OpenOffice.org 2.0 (OOo), it doesn’t have native support for creating tables of authorities (a.k.a., tables [...]