Another Tech Blog

Another issue I come across now and again is finding the windows product key for a client who doesn’t have the original software his machine came with.  In many cases, the OS product key is on the Microsoft label right on the machine, but if you need the Office product key, or if the product label on the machine is illegible and you have to rebuild, what do you do?

The Product Key is not stored in an obvious place in the registry, but there are utilities that will find the key for you.  Magic Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a great little utility that is just the ticket.  Quick and painless, it will give you the OS key and the Office key.

There are others out there, but since this is a touchy area in terms of software piracy, many of the tools are laden with viruses – be careful!!

You would think this would be easy, right?  Well it is.  Sort of.

Google in their infinite wisdom provides an application to sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, but not your contacts.  I hope this on the way, but for now you need to use a third party app to sync your contacts (more on that later).

So, how does the Calendar sync work?  The setup instructions are here, but in a nutshell, this is what you need to do.

1. Download Google Calendar Sync at http://dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe
2. Once a dialog box appears, click Save File. The downloaded file should open automatically. If it doesn’t, manually open it from your browser’s download window.
3. Click through the install options and install the application on your machine.
4. Once the installation completes, the Settings window will appear
5. Enter your email address and password and select the Sync Option you prefer.
6. Click Save and you are done.

Things should start to sync right away.  You can change any of the sync options by double clicking (or right click, options) on the Google Calendar Sync icon in your system tray.  You can also force a sync by right clicking the system tray icon and choosing Sync.

So what about contacts?  There are a couple of  third party apps out there, and frankly I’ve yet to find one I really like, but gSyncit is pretty good and is cheap – $9.99.  gSyncit is nice because you can sync multiple calendar and contact lists.  The only drawback is that it’s a one man shop, so I’m concerned about long term support.  The other app that seems to have decent buzz is OggSync.  I found this one confusing, but maybe I’m missing something.  My hope is that Google solves this quickly so that I don’t have to rely on third party apps.

Have you ever wondered where Outlook stores data it uses to auto-complete email addresses when you are typing in the To or Cc field?  Microsoft stores this data in a file with the extension .NK2.  The file is stored in each user’s profile in drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.  Note that this may be a hidden folder, so you may need to change your view settings to see the file.  The file should be named outlook profile name.nk2.

Every time you enter a new email address when composing an email that address will be added to the nk2 file so that the next time you type the name, the auto-complete feature will try to guess what you are typing and fill in the details for you.  Very handy.

There are a couple of things that you may be thinking you’d like to do with this information.

1) Move the data from computer to computer

2) Edit the entries in the file

3) Reset the file so that is starts from scratch

4) Turn Auto-complete off

All of these are simple enough to do.

1) Move the data from computer to computer.

The file is profile specific, so you need to be sure that the profile exists on both machines.  Once that is done, it’s simply a matter of copying the file from one machine to the other.  Again, the location of the file is in:

drive:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook profile name.nk2

If you have a new outlook profile that is the destination for the file, just rename the file to the new profile name.  This means that you can copy the same file to multiple users, just rename the file for each profile.

2) Edit the entries in the file.

This is a little trickier because Microsoft does not want you to do this, and I’d recommend making a backup copy of the file before messing around with it.  There are several utilites you can download that will let you edit the file.  Nk2View is a decent one, and is free.  Nk2Info is also free and claims to be able to repair the nk2 file.  Ingressor offers a commercial application to manage and repair the nk2 file.

You can easily remove an entry from the list – simply start typing the name you want to remove, then when the name appears in the suggestion list, highlight it using your arrow keys, then press the delete key to remove it.

3) Reset the file so that all entries are removed.

Microsoft describes the process here.  Basically, you can either flat out delete the file (make sure Outlook is closed first) or you can rename it so that you have a backup.  If the file does not exist it will be recreated when Outlook is restarted.

4) Turn Autocomplete off.

If you don’t want outlook to suggest names for you, you can turn this feature off.  In Outlook:

• Go to Tools, then Options
• From the Options tab, choose the E-mail options button
• Click Advanced E-mail options
• Uncheck “Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields.

What is this?  Tools.  Space tools.  Some of the tools that are being used in space to repair the Hubble in fact. 

Working on a client computer for the last two days that is massively infected.  When they handed the machine to me, there was no firewall, no virus protection and windows updates were way out of sync.  Whoo boy.

Windows update was not working at all – one if the viruses had put in their own DNS entries so that when you click on Windows Update, you got sent to Google.  It had also removed DNS entries for all of the update sites for the major anti-virus and anti-spy-ware sites.  Once that was corrected I was able to run several virus and malware scans with updated software.  There were some viruses (50 or so) that were cleaned, several reg hacks that were fixed and the drives were de-fraged, but I’m still having issues.

Right now, there are two problems left.  First, some of the recent windows updates won’t install (sp3 for example).  The installation starts, goes for a few minutes then I get a pop up that says “installation cancelled”.  Frustrating, but I’m assuming this is a virus I have not eradicated completely yet.  The second problem is that the machine will randomly freeze.  I don’t know if this is hardware related (heat? disk? memory?) or part of a virus.  This was the initial complaint from the owner, by the way – that the machine would randomly freeze.

I’m using Zone Alarm, Ad-Aware, IO-Bit, and malwarebytes.  Next up, McAfee.

There are tons of little tweaks to XP out there that make the GUI more useful.  One of the things I’ve found is that the default elements of the contextual menus in XP do not always have everything you want in them.  Thankfully, much of these things are customizable.

I love the “Send To” right-click menu item.  It allows you to quickly move files to helpful places – to an email, to a CD/DVD for writing, etc.  The only problem is that I’d like to add to the list of destinations so that I can move files to my frequently used locations easily.  

To add a destination to the Send To list, go to c:\documents and settings\(your user name)\sendto.

This is a hidden folder, so you may have to change your tools\folder options settings to “show hidden files and folders”.

Then just copy a shortcut to the destination you want (directory or program) and you are good to go.  I’ve added frequently used network file locations and Textpad.  It makes simple, repetitive tasks so much faster.

I get asked this a lot.  When you run Task Manager in XP and look at the process list, you see tons of svchost.exe processes running.  You can’t kill them (you don’t really want to) and there’s no obvious reason that there are so many of them.

What are they?  Microsoft describes them like this:

“Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).”

Helpful isn’t it?  Simply put, you can’t run a DLL without a host program.  Since Microsoft needs to run lots of different services that are DLL’s, it created a generic host executable to run them – svchost.exe.  There are lots of instances of svchost for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, redundancy.  If all of the OS DLL’s were under one process alone, if any one of them crashed the host process, the entire operating system would crash.  Second, Microsoft likes to logically group similar services under similar hosts.

So how do you see what’s what?  There are a couple of ways.  In XP, there is a command line utility to view process information.  Run tasklist /SVC from a command line.  The output looks like this:

If you are running Vista or Windows 7, the Task Manager is much more helpful.  You can right click on a svchost process, then choose “Go to Services”.  This will open the services tab and highlight the related services.

There is a great utility called svchost viewer that shows you the services for each svchost process in a nice, easy to read tree view.  Download the program here.  Thanks to HowToGeek for the tip.

eWeek is reporting that Google is releasing software for BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) that will allow GMail to be routed to blackberry devices.  The software is in beta now, but will be available to users of Google Apps Premier when it is fully released in July.  Right now, the application syncs mail and contact information between the mobile device and the web application, but for calendar, information transfer is one way – from the web to the device.  Google says two way calendar sync will be an enhancement for later release.

According to Google’s release, Gmail will sync to the device in 60 seconds.  In field testing by eWeek, contact and calendar “do not get pushed to the device like e-mail does, but instead they piggyback with push mail.”  According to Google, this is to save on battery life.  Sounds like a nonsense explanation to me, but who am I to question.

I like the sound of this, but coming from a financial technology background, I don’t see it as being adopted by any finance firms because of the email retention and compliance rules.  Google Apps does have Postini for retention and compliance customization, and for legal searches, but I’d be surprised to see a finance firm releasing email control to any third party.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Gmail, and I think there are huge advantages to Gmail for the enterprise.  I have, in fact, recommended it to a client of mine.  That said, there is just no replacement for native MS Exchange.

There are lots of ways to do this, but I have a couple of favorite sites that show you the location and other details about an IP address.

Geobytes gives you location information including latitude and longitude, time zone from GMT, country, region, city and a Google map of the target location.

Find-IP-Address.org has convoluted site, but has lots of information and a map.

IP-Address.com also has a decent site, albeit a bit convoluted.  They have lots of other tools there too, including a reverse IP lookup, proxy checker and a decent IP FAQ.

A WhoIs search will give you the registrar of the domain and contact information on the owner.  I like Arin Whois seach, but there are lots of them out there.

This is one of those tweaks for XP that is useful if you have users that have a lot of sensitive information on their machines and you want to be sure that none of that information is left in the Page File forever.  It’s not a panacea, but is extra piece of mind.

There are many third party apps that will write unencrypted information to the Page File (passwords, userid’s, whatever) and since the Page File is never cleared, just overwritten, that data can stay there forever. Luckily, Windows provides a registry key that you can set so that the Page File is cleared when you shutdown the machine.  Since you all have reboot schedules for your sensitive machines (you do, don’t you?) this tweak will ensure that nothing is left to chance. The only downside is that shutdowns will take a bit longer.

In regedit:

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Modify the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value to ‘1’