Blog: General

Recently at a branch office of one of our customers, we needed to find where the fax line terminated in the wire closet so we could install a LAN Modem.  We contacted one of the technichians for the company who installed the phone system.  The technician did not know where the line terminated but said a quick way to find out was to unplug the phone line from the device, so that it will continue to ring, dial the number, and then use your finger to bridge each connection on the punchdown panel.  The one that “jumps up and bites you” is the line you are looking for.  A less manly (but slightly safer) way to do this is to use a screwdriver instead of your finger and listen for the call to sound like it connected as you check each line on the punchdown panel. 

Many times we end up scanning documents that customers send to us in response to our Audit Information Request.  The scanned documents are much more useful when they have been OCR-ed (Optical Character Reader) because then it is possible to search for words and terminology.  The OCR process is one more step in Acrobat and so when we run out of time, the documents do not get OCR-ed.

Adobe provides batch processing in many of its applications.  I found it in Acrobat Professional (in the title menu under Advanced).  You can define actions, in this case to OCR all the pdfs found in a folder (you specify).  Not only will it perform the action, but then you can define where it saves the new files and if you want it to rename the files (like “OriginalFileName-OCR”) attaching “-OCR.”

There are several pre-defined batches as well as the options to build your own.  Automating redundant tasks will save you time.

Distribution lists in outlook have a size restriction that will not allow you to add more members once a certain limit is reached depending on how big each contact’s information records are.  A work around is to split the distribution list up into multiple groups, or what I did was create a distribution list in AD and allow the user “owner” privileges on it.  After adding members, you can also remove it from being listed in exchange global address book and add the global DL contact to their local contacts list.

In troubleshooting a very obscure error in Outlook 2003 (0x800…error unknown), I ran across a very helpful tool called the Inbox Repair Tool (scanpst.exe). This tool can be used to find and fix errors in a .pst or .ost file. Scanpst.exe file is found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\ on a standard Windows XP and Office installation. One of the less obvious things about .pst and .ost files is that they never reclaim unused space. They just keep growing much like Microsoft Access jet databases. If you want to shrink the size of your .pst or .ost file, you must manually compact it. If you use Office 2k3, go to Tools -> Options -> Email Accounts -> View or Change an Existing Account. Then select your Exchange account and click “Change”. Select “More Settings” and on the “Advanced” tab, there is an “Offline Folder File Settings” button. Click that and choose the “Compact Now” button.

Excessive log files can be generated by both the Symantec AV client and the Windows Application Event Log when running ThinkVantage Away Manager and the Symantec AV client.  These programs conflict with each other and generate several log events per second.  On the laptop of one of our team members, the Symantec log files had grown to 5GB in size.  There are two methods for stopping the conflict.  [more]1) Turn off Tamper Protection in the Symantec AV client.  2) Uninstall ThinkVantage Away Manager.  It is basically Lenovo’s version of Windows Scheduler and did not appear especially useful.

Symantec stores the log files at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5\Logs.

We supply most of our electronic documents to customers in pdf format.  We also have been using watermarking documents as DRAFT during the write and rewrite process.  As we print word docs to pdf, the document becomes much larger (5 to 6 times bigger) as Adobe converts the DRAFT mark to a graphic on each page.  It can make it difficult for customers to print.

Using Adobe Acrobat Professional there is a feature that also allows you to create a watermark.  If you use Acrobat to create the watermark, the final file size is much smaller (less that half the size.  You find the watermark feature in Acrobat under Document in the Title menu.   There are several options.  You can input any text in the provided source box, click on “Fit to Page” and select color, transparency, etc.  Also, you can choose if you want the water mark to display on the screen, only when printed or both.

The recovery partition on ThinkPads installs in two different sizes depending on how you install it.  If you revert to factory settings, the recovery partition should be 4-5 GB.  If you restore the system from a Rescue and Recovery backup, the recovery partition will only be about 500MB.  The down side is that Rescue and Recovery installs/upgrades write files to the recovery partition.  The 500MB partition fills up very quickly and prevents you from upgrading/installing Rescue and Recovery.  Your two options at that point are 1) research Rescue and Recovery to see if there is an install parameters that prevents files from being written to the recovery partition (in the interest of time, I have not done this), or 2) remove the recovery partition and then install Rescue and Recovery.