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Vol. 6, No. 35
8-24-06
1 OE housecleaning
2 The wrong way to backup data
3 IE7, MS targeting hinky web sites, bye Ditty Ditty, so long Pluto
4 Pandora Playlists
5 Virus cleaning
I’ve beaten the importance of regular backups numerous times over the years but I’ve never touched on general maintenance of the original files or folders. While not quite as critical, an occasional pruning of the deadwood is still an important part of system stability and performance.
Over time your Inbox can get too large to be handled correctly and become corrupted, your Favorites list can build up a plethora of dead links and your My Documents folder can become choked with useless temp files, many of which you can’t even see.
This week I’m going to concentrate on Outlook Express, although the theory applies to any email client. Over the next few weeks I’ll hit on the browser cache and Favorites/Bookmarks as well as auto-save Office files (others may come to mind so it may run longer, you know how I am ;))
The first rule of thumb for keeping your mailboxes clean and manageable is not to use the Inbox for storage. Make specific folders for certain types of emails like Receipts for online purchases, Work for work related emails, Personal for non-work related… you get the idea. Once you have a good set of folders made you can move related messages into those folders and free up space in the Inbox.
To create new folders in OE just open the program and right click on Inbox. Choose “New Folder” and type in the folder name and click OK. The new folder will pop up in the Inbox folder on the left. You can also right click on Local Folders and create the new ones outside the Inbox if you want to be really fastidious.
Either way you’ll be keeping the root of the Inbox less cluttered, make finding old messages easier and lessen the chance of file corruption due to sheer size.
The Sent Items folder is often worse than the Inbox when it comes to serving as a pure storage folder. The same rules apply with these emails. Make subfolders and move the appropriate emails to them to cut down on congestion. Personally I make folders for each year of saved outgoing email and move messages accordingly.
Deleted Items is the last folder I’ll touch on this week. Obviously these are items that you didn’t want, like Spam emails, but the default setting in OE is to leave the Deleted Items folder alone. Over the years I’ve seen these folders swell to several gigabytes of hard drive space and this is not only a waste of storage room, it can lead to corruption of the entire mailbox structure.
As with the Inbox I don’t recommend the Deleted Items folder for storage. Make a Hold or Save folder for that. I suggest dumping the contents of this folder each time you exit Outlook Express, which you can do by opening the program and clicking Tools and Options and clicking the Maintenance tab.
Check the top box, which is “Empty messages from the Deleted Items folder on exit” and those messages will go away permanently each time you close OE.
Next week we’ll cull the dead links from your Favorites folder but until then, stay safe…
Kevin Mefford
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Version 7 of
Internet Explorer is now at the Release Candidate 1 stage
and sports more
than 200 changes. That's a lot of overtime for
somebody:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/92496/microsoft-makes-200-changes-to-ie7.html
Microsoft
Corp. has launched a legal campaign against companies that
register Web
addresses designed to attract extra online traffic by
incorporating common
misspellings and trademarked terms:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/282198_msftsquat23.html
PC
vendor Dell confirmed Thursday that it is discontinuing its DJ
Ditty, after
yanking the bite-sized digital music gadget from the
music-player section of
its web site last week. In other news, Steve
Jobs has released a press
statement which repeats the phrase "You will
be assimilated" over and over
again:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=18143&hed=Dell%E2%80%99s+DJ+Ditty+Dead
And
finally, Pluto has been fired from its job of being a planet,
meaning that
Earth's Early Warning Station will have to be located
elsewhere in the
future. Neptune has filed for hazardous duty pay:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/24/AR2006082401186.html
Copy
us on the good stuff, because Heaven knows I'm not getting a Pulitzer
;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.mattstodayinhistory.com
Download of the Week
I’m not sure if
we’ve mentioned Pandora here.
Pandora is a great music program discovered by chatter Dan Dennison
located at www.pandora.com. Once you’ve played with it for a while,
you might want a way to record what you listen to.
Harnessing the work of the Music Genome
Project, Pandora looks at the tunes you choose and then introduces you to other
songs that share the qualities you enjoy. The only trouble with Pandora is that
you couldn't take it with you--until “Pyrrah” came along. This desktop program
builds podcasts based on your Pandora stations. Once you've installed and
launched “Pyrrah”, you log in with the same e-mail and password that you use for
Pandora. “Pyrrah” then accesses your Pandora account and lets you choose which
stations to receive as podcasts. The program builds a personal MP3 file in a
matter of minutes, giving you up to 5 hours of musical
discovery.
These personalized podcasts, called pyrcasts,
work on any MP3 player. “Pyrrah's” makers, Pyrcast Online, stress that this
program is meant only to make Pandora portable, not to infringe on
copyrights. “Pyrrah” is
free:
Art Maley
Email Question of the Week
Q: I am running AVG antivrus free edition.
Test results show I have a
trojanhorsegeneric.XDR in
C:\windowssystem32\entry.dll backup copy
infected. It won't allow me to put
in virus vault or heal or delete.
What should I do?
A: I found these excellent instructions for
cleaning your PC at the AVG
website's forums.
Take your time and things
should work out:
http://forum.grisoft.cz/freeforum/read.php?4,27725,backpage=,sv=
Good Luck,
Art Maley
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