Category Archives: techy stuff

Repairing Outlook 2007 PST Files

Posted on by
Reply

Repairing Outlook 2007 PST Files
By Jacob Erdei

When it comes to Outlook 2007 Microsoft has done a great job of building in repair features for Outlook. They have a built in memory scanner as well a tool to actually scan for corrupt Office files and make a repair.

Besides having to get used to a completely different layout and having to save files in 2003 format for other people who never use the updates in office the other big draw back is the automatic PST file repair tool that is built into 2007. While it does a decent job at repairing your mail file it still is lacking.

The built in tools is called Scanpst.exe, located at C:Program FilesCommon FilesSystemMSMAPILocaleID folder – normally called1033. Just double click the file and follow the on screen prompts. Be sure to also make a backup of the file when asked. Nothing is worse then overriding your existing outlook mail file.

In about 50% of all cases I have found this tool to work well and fully resolve the issue. You should also note that Outlook 2007 has to be closed for you to run this repair tool.

I know I don’t need to say this but I hope you have learned your lesson. It is very important to backup your files in case a computer crash or corrupt files. You should also store them on a separate hard drive to ensure protection.

If the built in tool did not help then all is not lost just yet. PST file repair can be a bit daunting but you can find many other resources online to help you resolve your issues. worst case you can always call in a pro or use a specific software program to help you out

In many cases people loose this file due to a hard drive malfunction. If this is the case then you should expect to pay any were from $159 dollars all the way up to $1800 to recover the information. The lower cost is best case and normally only happens when the NTFS partition is damaged. The higher cost is when the drive does not even spin up and a company needs to take your disc spindals and place them in another hard drive. The best thing you can do is to call around to several computer repair shops and see what advice they can offer. Many places do data recovery however they all do it differently and you need to find an expert at this to ensure no more data loss or damage is done.

For more information on this you can view our this outlook 2007 PST repair guide.

Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Disk Space

Posted on by
Reply
I personally use TrueCrypt to secure my thumb drive (USB drive) in case I lose it. Since I put all of my writing on it and carry it with me, I think it’s important to secure it. I lost a USB drive years ago and I was devastated over the loss, especially since it had my manuscript on it. I may lose it again, but I won’t have to worry about the contents.

Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Disk Space
By Kim Lung

USB flash drives are common place in the work place and home and have almost become a necessity like the desktop . But, however handy these devices may be, they can also serve as a tremendous source of data leakage. USB flash drives have become as common as writable CD-ROM drives in most organizations. The problem is that some users have access to sensitive information, and want to have access to it no matter when or where they are. I can’t tell you how many people store sensitive information on USB flash drives. Information such as passwords, corporate secrets, and sensitive personal information just sitting on the USB flash devices is not secure.

And with the easy of use (plug and play) anyone can just plop the USB flash drive in and they can store about 16 GB as of January 2009 ish. 16 GB of data on a flash drive is insane! Image the amount of data one could leak with all that disk space! Disgruntled employee’s could copy data to the drive and sell it to a competitor, by the GB, LOL. How about thieves? They can steal the drive easy as 1,2,3 and no one will ever know who did it. Stealing it would be easy due to it’s size, think about it.

But don’t worry there are many ways to secure the data on a flash drive:

Password Protection

Encryption

Buried under a concrete slab

Password protection will stop the most elementary user from gaining access to your device. The data however is not fully protected and needs to be secured from more technically apt user. To secure the data from this type user we will use

Encryption, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric encryption is an encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government. AES jumbles up the data and makes it’s virtually impossible for anyone to read the information on that disk.

Buried under a concrete slab would be one extra step… ha ha?

From my experience I recommend both the Lexar JumpDrive Secure USB Flash Drive and the Kingston DataTraveler. Both of these devices use AES and are simple to understand and use. USB Flash drive security can also be accomplished with free software available online.

If you have already invested in a jump drive you could encrypt it with TrueCrypt, free open source encryption software. TrueCrypt creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. Provides two levels of plausible deniability, in case you’re forced you to reveal the password:

1) Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.

2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).

TrueCrypt also user ASE 256 encryption.

How to Use a Laptop to Control a PC Tower

Posted on by
Reply

How to Use a Laptop to Control a PC Tower
By Janean Wilson

I wanted to get rid of the my bulky monitor and replace it with a LCD monitor. But like most of us, it was just not in the budget. I did have a laptop and it was connected to my home network. I had to set up a home network to share my internet connection with my son.

So I thought, it would it be great if I could use the laptop to run my tower. That is when I discovered what the Remote Desktop Connection can be used for. This program is included in the Windows XP Professional version. To start with, the Host Computer (the pc tower with XP Pro) should be running and connected to a router or hub.

To set up Remote Desktop Connection

(RDC) on the host:

Start > Control Panel > System Select the Remote Tab.

Check the box to Allow users to connect remotely to this computer. Note the Full computer name, this will be needed for the laptop to find the host computer.

You will also need to set up an user account with password for the remote connection to work. This may be already set up for you, if you have to enter a password to login to your desktop computer. Then the Client (the laptop with XP Pro) should be running and connected to a router or hub. If your laptop is not XP Pro, you will have to download the client portion of Remote Desktop. This program allows other versions of Windows to remotely connect to a computer running Windows XP Professional with Remote Desktop enabled. On the laptop, start the RDC client program, enter the host computer name in the drop box marked computer. Then enter your username and password, the one you use to login to the host computer normally.

Press the connect button and watch what happens next. Your laptop will act like it is connected directly to your pc tower. You will see the entire desktop screen, just as if you were looking at the monitor connected to the computer. This is great for older laptops with a small hard drive and slow processor. The host computer does all the hard work and can even store the files created during the remote connection. Have fun and enjoy this practical laptop trick!!

Visit http://www.buildtheperfectpc.com for more Laptop fun ideas.

My WordPress Plugins

Posted on by
Reply
I’ve spent a bit of time learning about WordPress (which powers this blog) and some of the plugins that are available for it. Depending on what your requirements are, there are a multitude of WP plugins that you can choose from. Here are some of mine:

  1. Align RSS Images – Makes image alignment work in RSS feeds
  2. All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog
  3. Broken Link Checker – Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
  4. Facebook Comments – Copies comments from your imported Facebook Notes back into your blog entries.
  5. Frame Free – Frame Free is a plugin to remove any frame created by Digg, Facebook, Google Images, Ow.ly and any other third party services.
  6. Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
  7. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
  8. LiveJournal Crossposter Remix – Automatically copies all posts to a LiveJournal or other LiveJournal-based blog. Editing or deleting a post will be replicated as well.
  9. Live Space Sync – A Live Spaces rpc plug-in.
  10. MaxBlogPress Favicon – Easily add favicon to your blog without editing any wordpress files.
  11. Post Notification – Sends an email to all subscribers. (this is how I cross-post to blogger)
  12. Search Unleashed – Advanced search engine that provides full text searching across posts, pages, comments, titles, and URLs.
  13. ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others.
  14. Socialite – Publishes your WordPress posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. (I use only for Myspace)
  15. Target Blank In Posts And Comments – Inserts target=”_blank” into post and comment content URLs and external links will open in new tabs.
  16. Twitme – This plugin allows you to automatically post your new posts on twitter.
  17. Wordbook – Cross-post your blog updates to your Facebook account.
  18. WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
  19. wp-cache – Very fast cache module
  20. WP-Cumulus – Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress
  21. WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam.
    That’s not all of them, of course. What ones do you use?

Staying in Twitter’s Good Graces While Building Followers Fast

Posted on by
Reply

Staying in Twitter’s Good Graces While Building Followers Fast

Author: Wayne Weeks

If you are fairly new to Twitter, there are probably some things about it you don’t yet know, but that you need to know. Where Twitter is concerned ignorance is NOT bliss. In fact, break a rule or two and you can get your Twitter account suspended. I have not personally experienced this, but have seen many suspended accounts in a few short months of tweeting. Just from that casual observation I can tell you I don’t want to experience it!

OK… so your Twitter account is open and you have a few followers but you would like to have a lot more. As you look around on Twitter you see people with thousands of followers. In fact, about mid-month April 2009, one Ashton Kutcher became the first member of Twitter to have over one million followers. How did he do that? I haven’t a clue, but how to get one million followers is not what this article is about. I just wanted to point out that having a lot of followers is possible, if you do it right.

There are some guidelines at Twitter that you will need to observe. The first one is to realize that Twitter forces you to start slow. You need to try to balance your followers with those you are following. I’m not talking about the need to follow who is following you, but that the number of followers and those you are following stay fairly close. This is most important while those following you total less than 2000. Until you get to that number you will not normally be able to follow more than 2000 yourself.

Start by following people you know. Follow all of them as they are likely to follow you back. Then start to add others, that you don’t know, but might like to know. You can use Twitter’s search feature to find people with interests similar to yours. Follow them, but don’t follow too many each day. You will probably be ok to follow 50 new each day, or 10% above the number of your followers, whichever is larger. Once you get past the 2000 block imposed by Twitter you will be able to step this up a bit, but in any event you probably won’t want to follow more than 15% above the number of people following you. Twitter has some sort of stop in place, but they don’t let that out. Let’s assume you get to 5000 followers. That means you can follow around 5750. Since about 1/3 of the new people you follow will follow you back, that means of the 750 above 5000 about 250 will follow you back. Having a few over 8000 following me, I am following a little over 9000.

I don’t use any sort of qualifying to select who I will follow, except I follow people following interesting people. I make the assumption there will be common ground. I try and follow all the new people I am going to follow on Friday, and stop following all who are not following me back each Thursday. That way I am covering the weekend users and giving the weekday users several days to follow me back.

OK… time for some personal bias. I don’t follow anyone who does not have a picture posted to their Twitter profile. It does not necessarily have to be a picture of them, but there must be some picture posted. My reasoning here is that if they won’t even take the time to put up a picture, they probably are not serious about Twitter and probably won’t be around very long. Most of the time I won’t follow those who don’t have a person’s name. I like to avoid the strange ones out there. I also won’t follow any one with evidence of any sexual overtones. If I see any profanity in their posts I immediately un-follow. I don’t follow anyone with any sort of title in their name line, especially Dr. or PHD. The reason is simple… my experience has been that they don’t follow back.

All you really need to do is set a regular somewhat conservative routine of following and un-following and you will be into the big numbers before you know it. Happy Tweeting!

About the Author:

Wayne C. Weeks –
Wayne is a published author, writer and blogger. You can follow him at: www.twitter.com/wcweeks He offers a free ebook to those new to twitter available at: http://bit.ly/10wjek

Tips How to View Private Myspace Profiles

Posted on by
Reply

Tips How to View Private Myspace Profiles

Author: PJ

We all notice that if you are a MySpace user, you’ve come across some profiles that you’re dying taboo to view but only to catch out that they’re set to private. You realize that the simply way to view their profile is to add them as a friend and hope they accept. Unfortunately, nearly of the time they don’t know you and they wont accept your friend request. However, I can show you how to view private profiles on MySpace.

I know personally, I’ve stumbled upon a profile of someone I thought I recognized. All I need to do is look into some more pictures on their profile to be sure. But when I try to view their MySpace profile, I find it’s set to private. Now I see the only way I can view their pictures is to send a friend request to them. But we all know that this can be tiresome and most of the time not work at all. If their profile is set to private, they’ll most potentially not add you as a friend.

Private profiles is a great feature on MySpace, however they can be a real annoying when it comes to finding friends that you haven’t seen in a long time, or becoming friends with someone that you think look cool.

Fortunately, I came across a site recently in some dark corner of the internet. On this site, you can enter the MySpace user ID and it will return with every picture that user uploaded on their profile, without having to send a friend request or gain access to their private MySpace profile. This is the greatest tool i’ve found in a long time. Now for all of that have wondered, here is a new way to view Private MySpace profiles. There, you’ll find how to view private MySpace profiles.

About the Author:

Check out MySpace Trends for more information on How to View Private MySpace Profiles, and everything else that is MySpace.

Add up to 500 MySpace friends per day, leave tons of comments and messages, and gain traffic to your MySpace profile by checking out Friend Blaster Try it out for free!

Get millions of song plays, profile views, and even get your song to #1 automatically on MySpace Music with MP3 Song Plays. You can even try it out for FREE!

The Antisocial Aspect Of Social Networking

Posted on by
Reply

The Antisocial Aspect Of Social Networking

Author: Gian Fiero

It’s estimated that more than one-third (35 percent) of U.S. adults have a profile on a social networking site, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s daily tracking survey of 2,251 adults. A more practical survey can be done just by thinking of the number of people you know who use these sites – starting with yourself.

While many will legitimately use social networking sites for broadcasting, distribution, and communication purposes, more people are attempting to instigate and manage friendships online.

Therein lies the problem. I contend that if social networking sites contribute to the decline or decay of social skills, they inadvertently create an antisocial mindset for people as they navigate in the real world because they become more adept and comfortable at socializing in an online world.

If you were walking down the street, or sitting on a bus and someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, “I’d like to add you as a friend,” you would look at them as though they were insane, or at the very least, with skepticism. Online, most people are not nearly as discriminate about their friend selections as they are in real life, but they should be.

Friends are afforded special privileges both online and offline. Offline you have to earn them. Online they are instantly granted. One such privilege is knowing who your other friends are and what you are up to. This comes in the form of “updates” which a surprising number of people use to post personal information and comments.

The shouting nature of MySpace (which is saturated with people who are eager to draw attention to themselves or their songs) makes it a favorite among a younger demographic of social network users.

Dr. Himanshu Tyagi, a psychiatrist at West London Mental Health Trust, stated in a recent report that people born after 1990, who were just five-years-old or younger when the use of Internet became mainstream in 1995, have grown up in a world dominated by online social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. He states:

“This is the age group involved with the Bridgend suicides and what many of these young people had in common was their use of Internet to communicate. It’s a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don’t like it and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable,” said Dr. Tyagi. “People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating, potentially leading to more extreme behavior to get that sense.”

It’s been my observation that most people don’t know who they have among their “friends” on MySpace. More commonly, people amass hoards of friends strictly for the sake of appearance – the appearance of being popular. So friends can get used both offline and online in that regard.

The 80/20 rule teaches us a lot about friends and time invested in friendships (which is what really defines them). 80% of correspondence that you send to anyone on any given social networking site will be sent to only 20% of the people you have in your “friends list.” Just as 80% of your time spent nurturing friendships will be with 20% of your friends. You are most likely to communicate with that 20% without the aid of a social network.

Facebook, for lack of a better if not more accurate description, has become the adult version of MySpace. As the real estate mantra goes: build it and they will come. But social networks have a saying all their own: build it and they will use it for illegitimate purposes.

B.J. Fogg, director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University and editor of a book called The Psychology of Facebook has been studying the social networking phenomenon for years. He argues that what we are doing on Facebook and other social networking sites is a lot like “primate” grooming. We are building “social solidarity” by publicly flirting and socializing online.

Yes, your suspicions are correct: the most illegitimate use of social networks takes place among people who are married or in committed relationships who use them to locate old flames. Actually, that’s not the illegitimate part. The illegitimacy stems from the resulting clandestine relationships that occur. There’s a lot of rekindling taking place on social networks…probably right now as you read this article.

According to Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at Cal State Sacramento and author of the book Lost & Found Lovers: Facts and Fantasies of Rekindled Romance, many people try to reunite online because it’s so easy,” Kalish says. “Most people go looking for lost loves, initially, out of curiosity. First loves in particular are most often sought out online, she says, and they pose the most danger to real-world relationships for two reasons: biological and emotional.

First, she says, when two people meet in the adolescent years (between 16 and 22), they start to form their identity together and break away from family. In those formative years, “you define what love is and what you want from a partner, and when you lose that, you lose that piece of yourself.” This combines with the hormones that are encoding in your brain at that age as “emotive memory” and creates a biological imprint of that person.

On top of all this chemistry, the adolescent years are typically the years when humans start to reach their reproductive maturity and look for biologically compatible mates. Kalish argues that this in turn causes problems because people are delaying marriage. She says, “we are so far away from marrying our first love because people are waiting until later in life to settle down. When they do settle down, oftentimes, the chemistry just isn’t the same.”

Perhaps this is the reason why in the Pew survey, of the adults who had removed their profile from a social networking site, 3 percent said they did it because their spouse or partner wanted it removed.

My favorite social networking site is LinkedIn. It’s essentially an online portal for resumes. Like the others, it operates on a membership/sign-up basis, but is geared toward professionals and building professional networks. Unlike MySpace and Facebook, people lead with their credentials on LinkedIn and the site regulates, discourages, and prevents abuse of the system by blocking those who get repeated rejections for linking requests.

It’s most distinctive feature are the recommendations that others make on your behalf to help you complete and promote your profile. The LinkedIn business premise is simple: you should know at least 5 people with whom you have real relationships who can endorse you to make you a more valuable connection to others.

LinkedIn is not a cozy, give-a-shot-out, tell you about my weekend, post a stupid comment about what I just saw on TV social network. It is for serious professionals who want to network with credentialed people without the levity and frivolity that is so commonplace on social networks. It’s not designed for conviviality and making friends.

Another social network that’s growing in popularity is Twitter. Twitter allows users to “follow” each other (i.e. keep up with each other’s activities) and is predicated on the exchange of short updates that can be seen online via their website or sent to you via your cell phone. I suspect that many music artists and professionals who regularly calendar events that the public, their fans, or constituents need to be made aware of will utilize it more in the future.

Personally, I have yet to make a friend through any social networking site. Nor do I know of anyone who has. I’m sure it happens. I’ve even been contacted by “friends” from my past. I’m hesitant to call them “friends” because I believe it’s extremely rare when you lose contact with a real friend.

Most of the time when we lose contact with each other it’s because we lacked the motivation or commitment to maintain the friendship in the first place; therefore, I tend to keep past “friends” in my past because that’s usually where they belong. Those who don’t subscribe to this philosophy usually end up briefly re-uniting with their past friends and drifting apart once more.

For me, the social networks offer their greatest value from a professional capacity. They serve as a divide between my associates and my friends, while allowing me to communicate with both simultaneously. But in the end, they offer us a reminder of just how valuable real friends and friendships are, if we can take our faces away from the computers screens long enough to realize it.

About the Author:

Gian Fiero is an educator, speaker and consultant. He is affiliated with San Francisco State University as an adjunct professor, and the United States Small Business Administration (SBA) as a business advisor where he conducts monthly workshops on topics such as business development, career planning, public relations, and personal growth.