Wednesday, May 18, 2005

The Big Boss's E-mail

Speaking of anxiety: yesterday, the CEO's e-mail stopped working. I am the IT department. After an hour with no success during the late afternoon, I took his computer home (it's a laptop) and virus scanned and virus updated, to no avail.

Today I re-installed Office and updated all the service packs. No go. Then I hit the Microsoft web site. Under the software "Outlook 2000", the keywords "not responding" have pages and pages of hits. I tried starting up with the preview pane off. No go. Then I got aggressive and tried the next close match to the problem description, and deleted all the Outlook registry keys and reinstalled (again).

It wasn't until after I deleted the keys that I thought, "Bad Word! What's going to happen to his e-mail?" Fortunately, the .pst file was intact and the keys were not relevent. It took forever for Outlook to come up, but it did. The CEO can send and read mail again.

He plugs the computer right into the wall, and power in our building is VERY erratic. I'm guessing it was an inopportune "spike."

6 Comments:

Blogger JoeinVegas said...

Add a small battery backup unit - probably around $80, usually with pretty good voltage regulators built in.

5/19/2005 01:29:00 AM  
Blogger Ann said...

Yeah, there's one sitting in his office waiting to be connected right now.

5/19/2005 09:07:00 AM  
Blogger Trail Seeker said...

Ah, computers. I am getting to the point I don't let my girls use the PC on the internet, they manage to get spyware gallore. I do what I can to prevent it such as firefox, adware software, etc. Now I tell them to use the Old Mac computer for internet browsing, it is impervious to adware and .exe files.

Your computer skills are impressive, to say the least, PC's are no easy beasts to tame.

5/19/2005 09:23:00 AM  
Blogger Miranda said...

I'm the same way, Trail Seeker. The kids can only surf online if I am present and I have banned several web sites because of all the gunk that clogs up my hard drive because of them. The best program to get rid of them, when adaware and your firewall have failed, is Hijack This. BUT, you have to have a good sense of what is supposed to be running so you don't accidentally delete something important.

5/19/2005 10:13:00 AM  
Blogger Ann said...

[blush] Are you Randy's Craig, or Mormon Craig?

Thanks for the kind words. The keys live in two places. The instructions are in Knowledge base article number 277019

5/27/2005 06:16:00 PM  
Blogger Ann said...

I think of you so often, MC! (That would be your rap name, I think.) Hurry back to town.

5/28/2005 05:03:00 PM  

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