June 2007 - Posts
I struggled for quite a bit this evening trying to transfer my Quicken 2007 over to my Vista workstation and get it up and running. I encountered two issues that several other people have also encountered, but the solutions were not always exact or correct.
The two main problems I encountered were:
1. After installing Quicken, every time I would start it up it would give me a pop up window with the error message: "Quicken is unable to complete the unlock process". The popup window kept appearing no matter how many times you closed it, and eventually I had to go into Task manager to close Quicken
2. After restoring my Quicken data from backup, I noticed that my Price History for Stocks was missing
The solutions are as follows:
1. First, a reminder: make sure you install Quicken by right clicking on the downloaded Quicken .exe installation file, and select to 'run as administrator
2. As to the "unable to complete the unlock process", the solution that worked for me was to open up IE7 and select to delete cookies. Trust me, I tried everything, including uninstalling and reinstalling Quicken four times before this trick solved the problem.
3. As to the missing price history data? When doing a backup within Quicken, the price history is stored in a separate (.qph) backup file. The tricky thing is that the 'date last modified' for the .qph file is not set to today's date (when you did your backup), but rather it's set to the date you last edited or updated any stock price history. In my case that was about a week earlier.
So when I went to copy over the Quicken backup files to my Vista workstation, I only selected those Q files with today's date, thus missing the .qph file.
Hope this helps someone else down the road!
-kw
This comes from a recent Sunbelt's WServerNews e-letter, but the remarks are similar to what's being said all around the web:
Just Say NO to iPhone
You are going to be asked (or already have been) to hook up the iPhone to your network's email system in some way. The problem is that the only protocol the iPhone supports is IMAP and that just does not cut it. The iPhone cannot work like a RIM BlackBerry or Windows Mobile. There is no built-in sync with Outlook that is secure enough. It does not work with Lotus Notes either. I think that is a major omission of Apple's part and they should know better if they want to sell to the business community.
For the moment the iPhone is is an attractive, expensive consumer device. Keep it out of your networks until Apple licenses software from either RIM or Redmond to act like a Blackberry or Windows Mobile. Another major drawback is that an iPhone user needs an iTunes registration, which means a music directory on the user's desktop (or lord forbid on the network share). That's a disk space problem and legal can of worms as which of these songs are stolen or violate copyright? Apart from all the above, block any other access because these things can slurp down a good chunk of corporate confidential data. Just say no.
It's a known fact that Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) very often get bloated (in file size). And if your company creates and stores lots of documents on your SBS server, especially documents with lots of graphic images, you begin to eat up a lot of disk space.
Until now, your choice was to zip those large documents. I recently stumbled over a tool called NxPowerLite that will compact Word, Excel and Powerpoint files (either in-place or create new versions of each file), primarily by compressing the embedded graphic objects in the file. The compacted file can still be opened, read, and modified by Word, Excel or Powerpoint.
I downloaded the trial version (they also have a free version) and converted three files each, and the results were fairly dramatic:
Word:
Document 1: from 665kb to 662kb (text only, no graphics)
Document 2: from 3,756kb to 1,058kb
Document 3: from 9,635kb to 445kb
Excel:
Worksheet 1: from 82kb to 32kb
Worksheet 2: from 252kb to 56kb
Worksheet 3: from 287kb to 252kb
Powerpoint:
Presentation 1: from 2,532kb to 1,563kb
Presentation 2: from 6,894kb to 2,175kb
Presentation 3: from 8,632kb to 6,707kb
MSAT is a risk-assessment application designed to provide information and recommendations about best practices for security within an information technology (IT) infrastructure.
It walks you through a long series of multiple choice questions in the areas of Infrastructure, Applications, Operations and People. It generated a 43 page report for me when I completed it - complete with best practices, findings and recommendations.
I recently configured 12 computers for a training room for a client. One goal was to be able to secure the setup of each computer. My objective was to be able to reboot the computers and have them automatically restored to a known good state.
The solution I settled on is a product called Deep Freeze from Faronics. Right now, I'm using the Deep Freeze Standard version, but I can see where their enterprise version would be very helpful down the road. The product works exactly as its advertised. Users can delete programs or icons, add new programs, download files (even viruses!), run WU/MU -- and immediately upon rebooting, the computer is instantly restored to its known, good baseline state.
This blog post is not intended to promote their product, or any product, but simply to let people know of solutions that work for me. Perhaps someone knows of a better solution than Deep Freeze. If so, I'm all ears!
Do you remember what happened in 1996/1997?
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Corel buys Wordperfect (I still miss WP5.1 DOS on a floppy)
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The original Palm Pilot was released
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Netscape Navigator 2.0 was "the" browser
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Windows NT 4.0 made its debut
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Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 3.0 for free
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Office 97 is released (come on, admit that you still like Office 97, and that you have people still using it!)
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Altavista releases BabelFish
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Microsoft released the Intellimouse -- a wheel mouse
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And finally, MSNBC went on the air
Happy memories!
-kw
RWW is a great feautre of SBS, but it does lack the ability to easily track RWW usage from users. As a reminder, Dana Epp's company (Scropion Software) has a program called RWW-Guard that not only offers the ability to use a two-factor authentication process, but it will also track RWW logon usage.
http://www.scorpionsoft.com/products/rww-guard/howitworks.html
-kw
Two years ago I decided to invest in some USB external hard drives and appropriate software, and then on a routine basis, go around and make a full image backup of each workstation and laptop in the office.
[Routine defined as "whenvever I have a chance" which means "maybe twice a year!"]
My primary reason for this was for disaster recovery purposes. Here in Florida, if a hurricane is coming, I can grab the USB drives and know I could restore data or complete systems. I've been using both Acronis TrueImage and StorageCraft's ShadowProtect. Both do a good job, and give me a different look on the data.
So, my boss comes in from a weekend trip and proclaims that his laptop is dead. I'm feeling pretty good because I had just ordered a USB-to-SATA/IDE cable kit last week and had just arrived. So I popout the drive from the laptop, and hook it up to the USB cable converter , and ... NOTHING. He's right, it's not mostly dead, it's all dead!
I overnighted a new hard drive for the laptop. After it came in and I installed it, I booted up the laptop using my Acronis Bootable CD, connected my USB backup hard drive to it, ran the restore software, and 30 minutes later the computer is ready to give to the boss.
But, I learned a long time ago that if you do something quick, people will expect that same turn around for future problems. So I let that laptop run for another two hours (burn in time for the new hard drive), and then with some accurately placed drops of water on my forehead, I brought the laptop to the boss and told him it was a tough job, but the laptop was now up and running (even though the old drive is still deader than a doornail).
-kw
Cell phones are great (when they work), and even better when they sync up with your email, contacts, tasks and calendar items from Outlook/Exchange. However, recently I had to resync a phone, and I'm still not sure what I did to create this situation, but afterwards I found that most of my task items were duplicated (and sometimes in triplicate) within Outlook.
I was not looking forward to deleting each of these tasks by hand. So a quick Google search got me to the Mapilab web site http://www.mapilab.com/ where they have a nice collection of Outlook and Exchange tools and add-ins, including their Duplicates Remover tool -- http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/remove_duplicates/.
While there, you may want to also check out their Exchange tool for server-side rules.
-kw
A recent post in the newsgroup dealt with a computer that was NOT added to the SBS domain using the 'connectcomputer' wizard. The result was that this computer did not show up in the list of computers that can be selected from RWW. The person wanted to know what could be done to fix this situation. Lanwench proposed the following process:
1. Go to ADUC, find his computer account (probably in the default Computers OU), and move it to MyBusiness\Computers\SBSComputers by right-clicking on
it and choosing Move.
2. Reboot his computer
3. Go to Server Management, Client Computers, and click on Assign Applications to Client Computers & click Next
4. Pick his computer/add it / next
5. Click next/finish/whatever, follow whatever steps it needs.
When that's all done, from his computer -
6. Go to Control Panel | System | Remote, and make sure Remote Assistance is enabled - and that he (or a group) is listed in the "allowed to connect"
box/button
7. Make sure the Windows firewall settings are correctly configured via group policy, so that Remote Desktop exceptions are set
Then try it. Easier to use the wizard, in the future.
If you read my May 19, 2007 Song you know I've been dealing with kidney stones literally for the last month. This was my first, and I agree wholeheartedly with everyone who says that next to childbirth, nothing is more painful! I finally passed the stones on Memorial Day. That's the good news. The bad news is that we had to postpone our scheduled trip to Germany and Italy.
The Lithotripsy procedure that I mention in my previous post did occur, but did not break up the stone. A week later, willing to do anything, I ordered some herbal supplements. Two days later the stones passed.
So, in honor of those darn stones, I dedicate this hit song from Garth Brooks:
I've Got Friends In Low Places
aka: I've Got Stones In Low Places
Blame it all on my genes
Or all that caffeine
That ruined my life for awhile
The last one to cry
The last one to die
I was the last one
To expect such a trial
And I saw the surprise
And the fear in your eyes
And I looked at you while feeling such pain
When I turned to you and said,
Honey, I'm not really dead
But I'm getting ready to scream:
'Cause I've got stones in low places
And the vicodin drowns
And the pills chases my pain away
God, will I be okay?
I've not suffered like this in ages
I'm at the ER, and the pain still rages
Oh, I've got stones in low places
I guess I was wrong
When the pain was all gone
But then, I've been there before
And everything is alright
I tried to just say goodnight
When I threw myself onto the floor
I didn't mean to cause a big scene
I'll need some water in a glass
To take some more pills
To cure all my ills
And this stone that's close to my *ss ....
'Cause I've got stones in low places
And the vicodin drowns
And the pills chases my pain away
God, will I be okay?
I've not suffered like this in ages
I'm at the ER, and the pain still rages
Oh, I've got stones in low places
Too often we (OK, "me") make solving a problem more difficult than it truly is. But, when you are in the thick of it, with customers upset that their computers aren't working, it's hard to see the easy solution.
For example, I had a computer that had been working flawlessly since it was installed in January. But yesterday it decided it would act up and take forever to connect to the Internet using IE7. However, Firefox worked fine. After trying the usual things that one does over the phone (empty the temp Internet files, run disk cleanup, delete cookies, reboot), I suggested uninstalling IE7 and go back to IE6, and see if that would solve the problem.
They did, and it didn't.
I suggested doing a System Restore to the prior day when things were running fine. Things started turning ugly as we are now getting problems trying to run IE at all. Next thing I know, we are stuck in limbo -- no IE6, no IE7. Installing IE7 doesn't work. I ended up grabbing the XP bootable CD and repairing this workstation. But the original problem remained after XP repaired itself.
That's when I decided to ask for advice. Sure enough, Ms Bradley was quick with the correct suggestion: did you try disabling IE addins? I wanted to say, "Of course, I did ... isn't that the first thing we all try?" -- but the truth was, in my haste, I had forgotten the obvious.
The point of my post is to remind myself we have a wonderful collection of experts here in the SBS newsgroups and forums. Make use of them. No question is ever too stupid or too simple. If I had asked my question yesterday, I would have saved myself several hours of frustration.
So, what's the contest? I'm interested to see which IE add-in people think caused my problems. Your choices are:
1. Google Toolbar
2. Adobe PDF
3. Both
4. Something Else
Post your response. The winner (that is, the winning add-in) will have a "Song of the Week" dedicated to them.
Cheers!
-kw