The thoughts of an IT manager

Opened up my internet explorer tab today to select a recently used thumbnail and noticed that I just had the standard Windows new tab page – yet Google toolbar was installed.
After a bit of searching I found that Google has retired the Google new tab page and most visited websites.

http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115561

This is a shame as it’s a very useful feature. More shockingly I don’t remember asking Google to update the toolbar on my PC or remove any of the features.
Although I do notice it’s still available on Chrome, so perhaps Google are starting to concentrate mainly on their browser.

Finaly found it… I have a dell E5400 Latitiude with a HDD that clicks every couple of seconds.

The drive in question for me was a Seagate ST9250410ASG

The fix is a firmware from Dells website which can be found here

The file is under the SATA options.

Starting up outlook 2007 today to trawl through my masses of junk email I get every day I was present with the dialogue box

“Outlook is unable to display the folder”

Then Outlook shut down – after 10 min of searching on the internet the following worked for me.

Outlook.exe /resetnavpane

Had a funny issue today with one of our AutoCAD 2010 pc, starting cad then closing immediately with no errors.

The problem turned out to be an issue with the network licenses file on the PC. To resolve the problem we had to delete the Cascadeinfo.cas file in the
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Autodesk\ADLM Folder

More info about this error can be found at:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=14908069&linkID=9240617

Over the weekend i have been playing with QR barcodes.

These are 2d quick read barcodes that can store much more information than a normal bar code.

You can then use your mobile with a scanner app and a camera to scan the barcode and get the information included within it.

Ive been using beetag app on my Blackberry Storm 2 to scan the code however i would like to find a scanner that alows you to import vcard information into your contacts.

Here’s a QR for www.mcreasey.com

Received a test Blackberry storm 2 from o2 today, I’ve had it for a couple of hours and here are my first thoughts.

We use a BES server here so setup was as simple as we expected. 10 minutes later – all synced with my email, contact and calendar and ready to start playing testing.

The first thing that I have noticed is the touch screen although response a definite press is required and a click is felt – although not a bad thing not what I expected.

Typing is fairly easy on the keypad although I have made a few mistakes.

I have installed Blackberry apps and the Wordpress app and all looks good. It does feel fast with little if any lag, which gives a good user experience.

First impressions are good, but I much prefer the physical keypad of my curve.

The ultimate question of is it better than the I phone – and the answer is ……. It’s different.

Sorry for sitting on the fence. The touch screen and typing is not as accurate as the I phone and the user experience is no were near as good. But it’s a Blackberry and a business tool with total control from my BES.
But is a touch screen really required as a business tool? And will the lack of physical keyboard hamper what the Blackberry is and always has been the best at – sending email.

Only time will tell.

Have you ever wondered why your photos and artwork look great on the screen but appear dark, dull and even the wrong colours when printed?

Welcome to the dark art of printing. There are normally two main reasons for this, Firstly your screen needs calibrating and secondly you are producing images in RGB (which 3dsmax does) not CMYK.

Most commercial printers work with CMYK colour scale (cyan, magenta, Yellow and Black). The conversion between RBG and CMYK is not exact, and RGB has a many more colours available (Vibrant Greens and Blues can be a particular issues)

This can be a very specialist area and plenty of reading may be required I did find this site very useful
http://designer-info.com/Writing/rgb_to_cmyk.htm

This is my first post from my Blackberry. App looks good and easy to blog from.

Were getting an annoying problem at the moment with a couple of our dell laptops.
If a user ejects them from a docking station and then plugs in an external projector for a meeting, windows does not see the VGA port and nothing is displayed – a restart fixes this and also if we keep pressing fn f8. This is a very annoying for the users especially if there in a hurry

I think it has something to do with the laptop still thinking it’s in the dock and not allowing the VGA port to be used as Xp can only show on two displays (laptops screen and dock or vga port)

If I find a solution I’ll keep you posted

Over the past few months we have started to have issue copying and pasting drawings into PowerPoint, especially if there is a lot of hatching.

If using the standard ‘copy’ in AutoCAD when you paste into PowerPoint the image quality can be very poor.

Historically we have used BetterWMF but this also has issues.

One possible solution to this is to use the ‘Copy Link’ option in Autocad (from the edit menu)

Now in PowerPoint if you do a ‘paste special’ again from the edit menu and select picture (JPEG), the image should paste but at a higher quality than before.