Windows

Fixing Outlook address book problems

Dave Farquhar Windows

Outlook 97/98 Problems. First, some background. Some of my users at work discovered that groups within contact lists created in Outlook 97 couldn’t be edited after an upgrade to Outlook 98. I searched around for answers and didn’t find anything. At one point, I posted a question on Usenet, but never received an answer. Finally, one of my coworkers called Microsoft. Their suggestion didn’t work, but it led us to something that did. So, here’s the mail.

Hi,

I saw your post from 02/02/2000 concerning Address Book group problems with Outlook 98. We have discovered the same thing and are looking for a fix. All our Outlook 98 installations are upgrades from Outlook 97.

I would be very grateful if you could tell if you have got a fix for this.

With warm regards from Finland,

Kirmo Uusitalo

Yes. Install Internet Explorer 5 and Outlook Express 5. Outlook uses a lot of IE code and even some OE code, and evidently there are bugs in IE/OE4 that prevent Outlook 97->98 upgrades from working properly that were fixed in IE5.

Troubleshooting Windows keyboard shortcuts

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Dave,
A friend of mine who uses Win98 has an irksome problem I don’t quite understand. Maybe you can shed some light on the matter.

Whenever he boots up, all the launch keyboard shortcuts defined in his desktop icon shortcuts are gone. He can manually select each one and redefine them (O for Outlook, W for Word and so on), but the next time he starts up (reboots), they’re all gone again.

These are stored in registry…?

/ Bo

—
Bo Leuf
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

I’ve seen that problem in 95, 98, and NT4. It appears that if Windows Explorer is the currently active application, they’ll work, but if some other app has focus, keyboard shortcuts on desktop icons won’t work. The only workaround I’ve found for this is to store keyboard shortcuts in the start menu. Those seem to work all the time.

I don’t think they’re stored in the registry, but I’m not sure where they’re stored. Win3.x had keyboard shortcuts too. If I had to hazzard a guess, I’d say they’re probably stored in the shortcut files in 9x/NT and in the program group files in Win3.x.

What to do when defrag won’t finish

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Optimizing a DX4/75. Talk about bottom fishing! But I do what I have to. This DX4/75 was driving me batty because it was taking a minute and a half to boot, and 30 seconds to load Word. Hard to believe this was once considered acceptable, even good, performance for Win95. But I couldn’t do much about it because with 16 MB RAM, Defrag kept getting interrupted. I fixed that. I opened win.ini, found the line that read shell=Explorer.exe, changed it to read shell=defrag.exe, rebooted, then defragged. Defrag was able to run without interruption, and significantly faster since it wasn’t competing for limited CPU cycles and physical memory.
When it finishes, the quickest way to get regular old Windows back is to hit Ctrl-Esc to bring up Task Manager, hit File–>New Task, type Explorer.exe, then edit win.ini and change the default shell back to Explorer.

But if you gotta get a system defragged absolutely as fast as possible, try the shell replacement trick. I’ve never seen this documented anywhere, and to tell you the truth, I thought of it in a moment of desperation. But it worked.

Optimizing Windows startup

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

Mail. More Windows optimization questions.

From: ChiefZeke
Subject: Re: Items to consider
To: Dave Farquhar

Dave,

Would things be a bit faster if the user opted to start programs via the ‘RUN’ function of the Registry rather than via the Startup folder? I have seen this option mentioned in a couple of magazine articles.

Jerry

I imagine they would be slightly faster, since the file and path names, etc. would be stored in registry keys all in one place as opposed to individual icons, one per program, scattered all over the place.

You might also use run= strings in win.ini instead–I suspect that technique would be faster still, being a flat text file rather than a convoluted database.

Now, whether doing this would make any noticeable difference on a modern PC is another question. We may be talking shaving fractions of a second off your boot time. I imagine the difference would be more noticeable on marginal machines (though I’m not very eager to re-commission my 486SX/20 to try it). I just saw a 486DX4/75 laptop today that takes 1.5 minutes to boot Windows even without any items in any of the startup places and a fully optimized msdos.sys–a decked-out modern system similarly configured could boot in about 15 seconds. I can’t imagine your system needing much more than 20 seconds to go from POST to desktop (I’m not familiar with modern Western Digital drives like you have but I imagine their performance must be comparable to the Quantums and Maxtors I use).

This trick dates back to the Win3.1 days, and it was a really good idea way back then–the startup group actually consumed system resources, plus valuable entries in the Windows directory, so eliminating startup and placing items in win.ini could seriously improve a system’s performance back then. Today, Win9x has much better resource management, hard drives and CPUs are much faster, so you don’t hear about it as much anymore.

Very little else for today. I found my copy of the Lost Treasures of Infocom (both volumes) this week, including Bureaucracy, a text adventure I was never able to beat. I found a walk-through that got me past the part that had me stuck.

It’s a whole lot faster on my PC than it was on my Commodore 128 (which was the machine I originally bought it for, what, 11 years ago?). Amazing how much fun a 12K executable paired up with a 240K data file can provide… (And I’m running this on a dual-processor machine with 96 MB RAM and an 8.4-gig hard drive, both due to be upgraded? Something’s wrong here…)

Windows NT profile weirdness: A cure?

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

From: Malcolm James
Subject: NT switches between local and roaming profiles [comment on View 10]
To: dfarq@swbell.net
Dave:
I just saw your question “Anyone ever seen NT switch between local and roaming profiles?” in View 10.

This used to happen to me too, about once every two months on average, but sometimes twice in the same week.. Using NT4.0J SP4 on a peer-to-peer NT workstation domain with no NT servers, NT occasionally created a new profile when I logged on. The old profile got renamed to username.bak, just as your analyst reported. Renaming the old profile and reconnecting shares puts everything back to normal.

We couldn’t find a documented solution, but one suspect was the size of the profile — 320MB, including an Outlook Express mailstore in its default location within the profile. Eventually I relocated the mailstore to a different partition and the not-recognizing-the-profile problem seems to have gone away. We still have no proof that the size of the profile was the cause..

Another suspect was that at one stage we’d had NT setup with the local profile pathname explicitly named in the profile section of the user manager. We later deleted it when we realized the pathname was only needed for remote profiles, but it may have left the registry confused at some point.

HTH

Malcolm

Thanks!

Attempting to optimize Windows with explicit paths

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

An interesting idea, this. But I’m not sure it’s worth the required time investment to see if it makes a difference for you.

From: ChiefZeke
Subject: Items to consider
To: dfarq@swbell.net

Dave,

A few more items to consider:

The various *.ini files usually point to files to load as oemfonts.fon=vgaoem.fon. Would it not be better to edit all files so that the full path is used instead; as above:
oemfonts.fon=c:\windows\fonts\vgaoem.fon ?

Also, when Folder Options – File Types – Registered File Types is reviewed many items are listed similar to rundll setup.dll ***. Again, would it not be better for the user to edit the complete listing so that the complete path is used; as above:
c:\windows\rundll.exe c:\windows\system\setup.dll *** ?

While I’m well aware of the tedium involved in doing the necessary editing I would think the end result would be worth it.

Jerry

Since Windows only looks in \Windows\Fonts for fonts, I don’t see how specifying a pathname there would help matters, and it might hurt. And I believe the ini files look for device drivers and the like in \Windows\System and possibly \Windows\System32 exclusively.

The registered filetypes is an interesting idea. Since Windows traverses the path (normally C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System;C:\Windows\Command) looking for that stuff, theoretically, putting a pathname in front of stuff that’s in C:\Windows\Command or C:\Windows\System would make it find the file slightly faster. How much faster depends on how full those directories are, of course.

I wouldn’t start editing without first making a full backup of the \Windows tree (or at the very least, a backup copy of the registry). I fear it might be an awful lot of work for very little gain. I’m always interested in even small speedups, and I’m sure I’ll end up trying it at some point (when I’m not banging my head against the wall learning NFS, NIS and NDS so I can write about them).

Proceed with caution, but if you try it I’m of course very interested in the results.

From: ChiefZeke
Subject: Re: Items to consider
To: Dave Farquhar

Dave,
It wasn’t only the .FON files I was talking about. I was also thinking of the .DRV, .ACM. etc files. In fact, I’ve already edited SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI to add the path in all those places that I’ve determined warrant it.

Also, while it took about three hours. I’ve also edited the entries for registered filetypes and that went smoothly. I feel there is no need to back-up anything, at this time, to accomplish that task. When you’re doing the editing the path and filename are monitored and any errors get a ‘beep’. Further, long-file names are also ‘beeped’ if they are not enclosed in ” “.

Since all operations are subjective as to how fast our computers really are I will confess I noticed no differential in speed during Windows start or program loading.

Jerry

vestigating that. It’s hard to know what tricks are going to make a difference and which ones won’t. I suspect specifying a path would help really slow systems with extremely crammed system directories more than modern systems with optimized directories.

Ultra-useful Windows and DOS utilities (plus Linux stuff)

Dave Farquhar DOS, Linux, Software, Windows , , , , , ,

4/3/00
There are loads of links in this mail. Explore them; you won’t be disappointed.

Hello. I maintain the Interesting DOS programs website and I was pleasantly surprised when I got an email telling me my site was mentioned in your book as a download reference site for XMSDSK.

While I only provided a link to the XMSDSK file on Simtel, it was still great to see my site which I never thought will ever get mentioned in any book, especially a Windows one 🙂

I got your book and I like it (a lot). However, there were some tools I thought should have gotten mentioned (most are mentioned on my site)

———————————————————————–

On Page 65, you mentioned FIPS as a tool to resize partitions. While I haven’t tried FIPS, there is another freeware utility which I’ve used several times :

Partition Resizer v1.33 It resizes/moves your FAT16/FAT32 partitions safely without losing the data on it. It doesn’t eliminate the need for FDISK. You use Partition Resizer to resize and rearrange the FAT16/FAT32 partitions to create free space on your drive and then run FDISK to create the partition.

———————————————————————–

The Infozip link at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip is orphaned and is no longer updated. An updated link is at ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/Info-ZIP.html

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On Page 209, you mentioned that internal Zip drives lack DOS drivers, this is not true as I have an internal ZIP drive and I access them from DOS. Perhaps you were trying the older drivers that came with the first Iomega parallel port drive?

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FastVid v1.10 Improves video performance on Pentium Pro and Pentium II PCI/AGP systems. I haven’t tested this myself but you may want to check it out.

———————————————————————–

LFN Tools v1.48 These are DOS commands (as stand alone EXE’s) that can handle long filenames in plain DOS. Supports FAT32

For example there is LCOPY which works like XCOPY under a DOS window (copying the long filenames) but in plain DOS. This is useful for diaster recovery situations when you can’t get into Windows and you need to get files off your Windows drive. Other commands include

LMD – create a long directory name LRD – remove a directory with a long directory name (e.g lrd “Program Files”) LDIR – like the DIR command showing long filenames.

The Tools are released under the GPL so source code is available and it is free.

————————————————————————

AVPLite Build 134 Free (yet powerful) command-line antivirus detection and removal program.

The engine is only is only 49K (the antivirus updates are about 1.7MB) but it can scan inside ZIP, TGZ, CAB, mail folders in Netscape and Outlook, DOC files). If there is a virus on a machine, you can have a bootable disk with XMSDSK to create a ramdisk, then have the AVPlite and the antivirus update on separate floppy disks unzipped to the ramdrive and then run AVPlite from the ramdrive.

————————————————————————-

Some Linux links :

SET’s editor v0.4.41

GREAT text editor with the fimiliar Borland IDE interface with syntax highlighting. This is literally the FIRST app to install after you boot Linux. Editing text files with Joe, Vi and Emacs were ummmmmm….. kinda difficult ;-). Released under GPL.

(SET edit is also available for DOS with a built-in MP3 player 😉 )

The one page linux manual A PDF containing a summary of useful Linux commands You mentioned on your Silicon Underground that you wished there was a command reference for Linux. This one is close

————————————————————————- Since you mentioned Win3.x program manager, thought I’ll mention this

Calmira II v3.02 Freeware Win95 shell/interface for Windows 3.x, including explorer, etc.

Mask for Windows – PRWin98 Gives Win3.x apps the look and feel of Win9x apps

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Looking forward to your upcoming Linux book (I agree with your sentiments on Silicon Underground – documentation is the main holdback for Linux)

Dev Teelucksingh
devtee@trinidad.net
Interesting DOS programs at http://www.opus.co.tt/dave
Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society at http://www.ttcsweb.org

— This email sent with Arachne, the ultimate Internet client —
— http://home.arachne.cz/ —

Wow. Thanks for all the links. That’ll keep my readers busy for ages and ages to come. I did immediately go download SET edit. Very, very nice.

I’m very glad you like my book and look forward to the Linux book. It’s coming along, faster than the Windows book did, but not as quickly as I’d like. I’m not even willing to hazard a guess when it will be finished at this point.

A year from now, there will probably be twice as many Linux books available as there are now. Maybe more. The quality will vary widely. But we need them. The stuff coming out of the Linux Documentation Project is getting better (or maybe I’m just getting smarter) but the stuff available even six months ago very frequently had gaps that a newcomer wouldn’t be able to climb over: missing steps, poor or inaccurate description of output–all kinds of little things that suggest the author didn’t take the time to step through the process one last time. A plethora of available Linux books will help in more ways than one.

Back to DOS and Windows… Although many people deny it, DOS is still an integral part of Windows, and some things just can’t be accomplished without diving into DOS. Even under NT, I always keep a command line open. I can tell you the last day I didn’t use a command line. It was in June of last year. I know because I was in New Mexico, far away from work and from any of my computers.

So Iomega finally got around to releasing Zip drivers that work with the internal IDE and ATAPI models? About time. We bought a big batch of them at work about two years ago, and I needed to access them from DOS, and nothing. The drivers wouldn’t work. We contacted Iomega, and their line was, “These drives require Windows 95 or newer.” A year later, when I was writing that chapter, drivers still hadn’t appeared. But better late than never.

Thanks again.

Underachieving Win9x Network performance

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

David Yerka asked what can cause really slow network performance in Windows 95/98. I mailed him, suggesting maybe someone had run MTUSpeed or some similar utility on the machine to optimize dialup performance. LAN performance tends to go into the toilet after doing that. (Voice of experience speaking… My Win95 box was a real dog until that light went off–long after my book was on store shelves, of course.) He responded with some useful information.

From: David M. Yerka
Subject: Re: Slow Win9x network performance
To: Dave Farquhar

Hi Dave:

Thanks for the reply you win the big bucks! That is exactly what is going on. Apparently Win9x only sets the MaxMTU in one place:

HKey_local machine\system\currentcontrolset\services\class\nettrans000

and while additional information makes this key appear to belong only to dialup networking apparently it is the place where Win9x picks up the settings for the network also. You were right also I remembered (actually, before I got your email) that someone had used MTUSpeed on this machine to optimize dialup before I convinced my clients to get a “webramp appliance” to do sharing. Unfortunately, it appears that even if you tell MTUSpeed to “remove all settings” it leaves the MaxMTU setting at say 576 (which is usually the best for dialup ISP’s). You must explicitly change the settings in MTUSpeed to 1500 and reboot BEFORE have MTUSpeed “remove all settings.”

Interestingly, I found that you could sort of hack the registry with a combination of stuff and seemingly get both optimizations: stick a string in the key below of MaxMTU=”1500″

HKey_local machine\system\currentcontrolset\services\class\nettrans\netservice000

Use MTUSpeed to set the MTU to 1500 reboot

edit the first key …\nettrans000 to MaxMTU=”576″ and reboot.

checking with MTUspeed (and don’t under any circumstance change anything) shows the MTU to be 576 while network performance approaches 950K for a 10T UTP network.

Isn’t Window just wonderful and weird.. or something!!

Thanks again David Yerka