My Insights

If you find yourself supporting/fixing computers for friends and family members, then LogMeIn is an indispensable tool for you. I use LogMeIn Free to remote control the computers that I support and the reason that I love this tool is because it does an excellent job of punching through firewalls AND it requires absolutely no interaction from the person being helped in order for you to establish a remote connection. You need to install a small program that runs on each computer that you support - ideally this can be setup by you the next time you get called for support.

System Tray Icon

What I don’t like about the client side software is that it puts an icon in the System Tray. However, I have found that you can kill this icon using the registry without impacting any functionality. This way LogMeIn is completely transparent to the end user and you have the ability to remote control their computer whenever they are experiencing an issue. In order to remove the icon from the system tray, remove the following entry from the registry-

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Delete "LogMeIn GUI"

The next time you restart your computer, the system tray GUI will not run but the core LogMeIn processes will run, giving you complete access to their system.

Vista Update (10/10/2007): It seems that the system tray icon may give you some trouble on Vista machines. The simplest workaround right now is to simply rename the executable located here: C:\Program Files\LogMeIn\x86\LogMeInSystray.exe to something else. Change the executable in the x64 folder on 64-bit machines. If you find a better workaround, please post it in the comments.

Authentication

The other part that might be tricky is the fact that you need a local user account on the machine that you are going to support. Now I haven’t completely figured why this happens, but apparently depending upon the mood of the installer, you may be prompted by the installer to create a “Computer Access Code”. What this really means is that the installer has created a user account for you on that local box called “LogMeInRemoteUser” and has hidden this user account from showing up on the XP Welcome Screen or on the User Accounts management tool in the Control Panel.

I wasn’t too comfortable using “LogMeInRemoteUser” on some machines and a personal local account on other machines. Therefore, I chose to create personal accounts on ALL machines that I support and deleted the LogMeInRemoteUser account in an effort to maintain consistency. I will not be covering the steps to create a local user account.

First thing I wanted to do was to hide my personal account from the XP Welcome Screen and from the User Accounts management tool in Control Panel. To do this, add the following DWORD to the registry-

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
Add DWORD for "AccountName" and set value to 0 to hide it from the UI

My Personal Account’s username is “Pranav” so I just create a DWORD for “Pranav” and set it to 0 ni the location mentioned above.

If you were prompted to create a Computer Access Code during installation, then the installer created a local account called LogMeInRemoteUser and you’ll notice that there is a DWORD entry in the same location for that account. Simply delete this DWORD and you’ll now see this account in the User Accounts management tool in Control Panel. You can then go ahead and delete this account if you wish to do so.

Conclusion

I am loving the product so far - especially since it is FREE and EASY. I have also been able to make this experience completely transparent for the people that I support and that is a great plus point for me. Please share your suggestions/experiences in the comments below.

The much awaited TR is here. I was getting quite sick of killing my Outlook process everytime I woke my computer from a hibernate.

I downloaded the Office 2007 TR (about 400 mb), this afternoon. I then went ahead and installed it. The installation process was nothing more than accepting the licensing agreement and clicking next. The entire update however took about 60 minutes on my 4200rpm hard drive (I know!) and it required a restart.

I made the mistake of opening OneNote in the middle of the update and that apparently cancelled the update instead of killing OneNote. I then killed the OneNote process using the task manager and then restarted the update process (60 min).

There have been some GUI changes and the most apparent one is the new icons! I love icons and for those who are dying for a preview, here it is-

Don’t they look cool? Anyways, one thing that the installer said while exiting was that I had at least one other product that needed the TR and I assumed this meant SharePoint Designer or Visio or something that isn’t part of the Office Professional suite. You can see how SharePoint Designer and Visio do not have new icons in the above graphic.

To confirm my theory, I went into my Control Panel and started the “Add/Remove Programs” application and checked the “Show Updates” box on the top. Take a look-

It looks like my initial guess was right even though I didn’t realize that Microsoft Project was not updated as well. Can someone confirm that the graphic above is displaying the old Project Icon and not the new one? In any case, I will download the TRs for these products later this weekend - especially SharePoint Designer which has a history of crashing on me at least 25 times a day.

Another new feature is the Splash screens. They now look different and have the letters B2TR engraved at the bottom right. Take a look at this Word 2007 splash screen-

The first thing I did after installing the TR is opening up Outlook to see if it still froze up on me eventually requiring me to kill its process. So far it has been behaving well and I feel like I can finally live happily ever after.

For the entire summer, I used Outlook 2007 (Beta 2) for email purposes. Although I am still not happy about the IMAP support by this product, overall there have been many improvements.

The UI has gotten more ‘Vista-Like’ for lack of better words. For the novice, that means more gradients and changing backgrounds with hovering mice.

The backend has also seen some new functionality such as integration with OneNote (yet to experience). However for the most part, the backend functionality behaves pretty much like Outlook 2003. If you are an avid Outlook 2003 user then Outlook 2007 will just seem like a new skin on your 2003 version.

About 2 months ago, I discussed this product with gokul over a series of emails and he expressed some concerns about the stability of this product. Although I didn’t relate to his concerns at that time, now that I have started to use this product more heavily, I can see what he is talking about. For example, the search folders on my IMAP account are highly unreliable and “Marking a message as Read” from within a search folder does not really mark the message as read.

I have also integrated my calendar and contacts information by importing using 2003 format .pst files from another instance of Outlook 2003 that I use at my work. The best thing I like about the calendar in Outlook 2007 is the fact that it can be published and subscribed to. To see my published calendar, click the My Schedule link on the right hand side.

Once you visit that calendar, you can actually subscribe to it in your Gmail calendar! Yes, this is one of those rare moments where MS and Google actually work in harmony. In order to subscribe to a published Outlook 2007 calendar in Gmail, first publish your Outlook 2007 calendar. You will get 2 links-

1) One that starts with http:// and ends with .htm: This is actually a MS hosted web version of your calendar. Ignore this

2) The second one starts with webcal:// and ends with .ics: This is the URL to subscribe to in your Google Calendar. However, there is a nasty trick to this. Before copying-pasting this link into google calendar to subscribe to it, change the webcal:// to http:// in order to make it work. Apparently, Microsoft came up with a fake enhancement to the http protocol and called the webcal protocol. It might provide them some extra functionality internally but as far as the iCal format goes, this webcal feed can act like a normal http-iCal feed.

The other issue I had with Outlook 2007 is related to hotsync. When synchronizing my Palm TX with my Outlook, it turns out that HotSync does not support Outlook 2007. There seems to be no update to HotSync to do this. The worse part is that due to this error in Outlook 2007 Synchronization with my Palm, the DocumentsToGo synchronization freezes up the entire HotSync process. It turns out that Outlook 2007 and Documents To Go don’t like each other. The solution was to turn off the HotSync Outlook synchronization and using Pocket Mirror to synchronize my Palm to my Outlook 2007 information. I am currently using a Trial version of Pocket Mirror but I am so happy with it that I might just pay the $29.95 for this software.

All in all, Outlook 2007 has been a fulfilling experience. I can’t wait for the TR (Technical Refresh) to the Beta 2 version of Office. In the meantime (before MS decides to let us know when Beta 2 TR is coming out), I will continue to work around the issues I have encountered with Outlook 2007 with a positive attitude.

Consider this a public service announcement for my fellow Motorola phone lovers.

If you are anything like me, you depend on your Motorola phone to wake you up in the morning with either a high-pitched ring tone or just an mp3 song from the phone.

However do you find that once you are up, you have to disable the alarm only to enable it again for tomorrow? That was me for the past year and a half and when I found out there was a workaround for it … I was mad!

The workaround: Instead of hitting disable, hit the red key which is also used for ending calls and turning the phone on/off. This will stop the alarm from ringing and will reset it to ring again the next day without you having to go through the stupid disable/re-enable ritual.

If you didn’t notice that I have a new banner on my website, then you need to visit my site more often (including you RSS readers). It was created using paint.NET which is nothing less than Photoshop as far as I am concerned … and it’s free!

It started development at Washington State University as an undergraduate senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing. (source)

Although the banner above might not say much for my artistic skills, it should definitely tell you that an amateur like me can easily generate professional quality images using paint.NET.

It was created using the following picture (taken by my brother in NY) on a layer which was made semi-transparent.

By the way, the fact that my banner is professional quality is not a matter for debate.

So what are you waiting for? Ditch that illegal copy of Photoshop on your PC and download paint.NET!

There is a Starbucks on the same block as my office and my parking garage. So every morning when I move my car into the garage, I stop by Starbucks for a chocolate donut.

One particular morning, I hadn’t gotten much sleep so I decided to waste my money on some coffee. So I look across the board and the cheapest thing I can find is for about $1.60. Now what can be the cheapest thing in a fancy coffee shop? REGULAR COFFEE. Keeping that thought in mind and the fact that 7-11 coffee is $1.29, I decided to order a “Solo Macchiato”.

Now first, I want you to take your mouse and compare it to your water/coffee cup sitting on your desk. Can you see why I am mad? A cup of coffee for $1.60 should be TALLER than my mouse!

After I open the lid, I find that this “cup” is only HALF FULL!

Wouldn’t you be mad too if you paid the price of “half a gallon of gas” to get a “pint of starbucks”?

Most of us today use more than one computer: Mainly a laptop and a desktop. There are files on both computers and we just try to remember which file is where. Sometimes the solution is to have a central drive on the home network. But what if you’re travelling? There are times when you want to keep copies of certain files on more than one location. But remembering what to copy can be an arduous task. Microsoft’s SyncToy is a free download that manages this for you. It is relatively simple to use and gets the job done. I think it is still a Beta release. Check it out: SyncToy

PS: For those of you without a legal copy of Windows, there ARE ways to get around the genuine windows testing before the download.