Dell Lets Users Refuse ‘Bloatware’

Dell customers may now decline unwanted software or ‘bloatware’ applications loaded on (Certain)new PCs.

Synching Palm Desktop Contacts with Outlook, Then to Blackberry

Jun 25th

Posted by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com in How To

I had a call last week from a user wanting to migrate his 600+ contacts from his Palm PDA to his new Blackberry. He seemed to think that we needed to order some special software for him to do this. The funny thing is he already had Palm Desktop software installed. He thought that the software was only to sync between his desktop and his PDA and nothing else. That is not the case at all.

The Palm Desktop software can export your contacts to a file which can then be imported into Outlook. To do it, just follow these simple instructions which I got from Microsoft Knowlege base Article 810930:

Export Address Book from Palm Desktop

1.	In Palm Desktop, click Address.
2.	Click File, and then click Export.
3.	In the File Name box, type Contacts.
4.	In the Export type list, click Comma Separated Values.
5.	Next to Range, click All , and then click Export.
6.	In the Specify Export Fields dialog box, click OK two times. The Contacts.csv file is saved in the My Documents folder.

Modify the CSV File

Before you import Contacts.csv into Outlook, you must create headers for the CSV file:

Open the file in Excel.

Click 1 to select the first row, click Insert, and then click Rows.

In the first row that you just created, starting with cell A1 and continuing across to cell T1, enter the following fields to create header names for each column:

•	First Name
•	Last Name
•	Title
•	Company
•	Work
•	Home
•	Other
•	E-mail
•	Address
•	City
•	State
•	ZIP Code
•	Country
•	Custom 1
•	Custom 2
•	Custom 3
•	Custom 4
•	Note
•	Private
•	Category

Click File, and then click Save.

Import the CSV File into Outlook

1.	In Outlook, click File, and then click Import and Export to open the Import and Export Wizard.
2.	In the Choose an action to perform box, click Import from another program or file, and then click Next.
3.	In the Select file type to import from box, click Comma Separated Values (Windows), and then click Next.
4.	In the File to Import box, click Browse, find Contacts.csv in your My Documents folder, and then click Next.
5.	In the Select destination folder box, click Contacts, and then click Next.
6.	Click Finish to complete the import operation.

For best results, when asked to map custom fields, take the extra five minutes to do that. You won’t regret it.

As far as the syncing to Blackberry part, since we have a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), once I included the new contact list in the users address book (Right click on the contacts properties, click on the Address book tab, and check on the box that says show this folder as an e-mail address book), the contacts synced with their Blackberry.

If you don’t have a BES at your company, you can still sync your newly imported Outlook contacts with Blackberry Desktop Software.

Originally Posted on Bauer-Power by El Di Pablo

backup, How To, pda/smartphone, Tips

Rebuilding your Blackberry

Jun 25th

Posted by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com in How To

No comments

Since we seem to be on a Blackberry kick today, I figure I’ll give a little gem that I have learned.

How to rebuild your blackberry.

If you’ve had a blackberry for any amount of time, odds are that you will experience the dreaded busted OS symbol which looks like a rectangle with a circle and a line through it. Or it will say something like JRE 401 with RESET under it.

If you’re at that point…you’re in a world of hurting. For one…if you have no backup, or BES server which will repopulate things for you, you’re SOL in terms of the data on it.

But the one great thing is that if it is just an OS problem as described above or you simply want to wipe your blackberry and start fresh as you might have a lot of apps on it that you don’t feel like removing one at a time, here’s how you’re going to be able to start over from scratch without having to lock the blackberry and enter the wrong password 6 times to get it to wipe the BB.

What you need to do to start is have the Blackberry Desktop Manager software, and the Blackberry JDE which you can get by clicking HERE.

After installing the JDE and all the pre-req’s for it, be sure to close the Blackberry desktop manager.
Connect the offending Blackberry to the USB cable that is connected to your PC
Open a CMD prompt
Move to the following directory: c:\program files\Research in motion\Blackberry JDE 4.x.x\bin
At the command prompt, type the following(THIS IS IRREVERSABLE!!!): javaloader -usb wipe and press enter

You have now initiated a wipe of the Blackberry handheld. It takes just a few moments and it is toast.

Now, you need to have downloaded a copy of the latest release of your handheld’s OS from RIM’s downloads site. You can find you model usually by going through your carrier’s support site. Download and install this package.

After the handheld has rebooted and comes up with the no OS symbol, you can open the Blackberry Desktop MGR software and open the Application Loader. This will tell you that there is no OS on your device and begin the process of installing the OS and giving you the options that you have to install based upon the handheld’s OS that you downloaded.

After the OS builds and installs, which should take about a half hour, you’re good to go back to square one. Just register your handheld back with your BES provided you have one and life begins a new.

Hope this helps someone out there. Lord knows it has gotten the higher ups around this joint back and rolling within an hour which they love.

How To, pda/smartphone, Question, Troubleshooting

Do you use SysInternals tools? Did you know they were acquired by Microsoft?

Jun 25th

Posted by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com in Admin's Arsenal

5 comments

Check it out – SYSinternals was aquired by Microsoft and they have been slowly integrating their tools into MS OS’s.

You can find all of their tools here.

We use a lot of these on a daily basis like WHOIS and PSTools, PSMon, PageDefrag, SDelete, PSKill, Handle, and PSInfo among others. These programs make the admin’s job a lot easier. Do you use any of these? Are there better alternatives?

Post your experiences and favorite networking/security/administration tools in the comments or hit us up at info @ asktheadmin dot com. (Every time I type dot com I have a google commercial going off in my head; they sure did a good job back in 2000! dot coooooooom!)

YourAdmin@TheBeach

Free, Geeky Goodness, networking, Question, windows

How do you protect young children from the evils of the internet?

Jun 25th

Posted by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com in Linux

9 comments

How young is too young to be using the internet? What safe guards to you put in place to prevent your youngins from becoming victims of internet preadators? Do you but filters on, use special broswers or programs? What websites have you introduced your little ones to?

Are there any programs to run on your computer to let a little kid push buttons, move the mouse and make things happen – to get them used to the computer?

Hit us up in the comments and for those of you out there that are young yourselfs your going to get older and have kids someday so you can participate as well. Hit us up in the comments or email info @ nycomputerdoctors.com .

TheExpectingAdmiN_ _

I love that picture… :) Is that too young?

It’s never to early and they are never too young!
So EduBuntu @ http://www.edubuntu.org/ looks to be a good choice for an OS and set up favorites for sites like:
http://www.noggin.com/, http://www.pbskids.com/, http://www.nickjr.com/ , http://www.playhousedisney.com/ , http://www.poissonrouge.com/

ALWAYS watch your children – let them browse but watch over their shoulders and be there for their questions. Because you know they will have them.

Thanks to Sarah from http://clanmcgrath.blogspot.com/2007/06/kids-internet.html

Keep em’ coming ill update them as more come in.

Question, Security, Tips

View MySpace from Work (or School)

Jun 24th

Posted by Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com in How To

3 comments

If you work for a company (or go to a school) that uses some sort of web filtering product like Websense, Surfcontrol (Now owned by Websense), Blue coat or something similar, then this article is for you. These types of software are used to keep you from goofing off at work. Depending on your IT department’s policies, certain categories of sites might be blocked from your work place. Sites with porn, or time wasting sites like MySpace are big targets for web filtering software.

There are ways around if you are slightly savvy. Once of the best ways is to use a remote web proxy to browse your out lawed sites. The remote web proxy lets you connect to a remote site, then use the internet at the remote site to browse the internet. Since the traffic is not really behind your company’s firewall, or filtering software, they cannot block the sites you are going to. There are public web proxy sites out there like Proxy420.com, the problem with them is that the big name web filters like Websense probably has already categorized those sites as proxy avoidance. So what is your alternative? You can host your own web proxy from your home computer.

I host my own website from home using Abyss Web Server X1 which is free. You can also use IIS if you are running Windows XP Professional at home, or even Apache for Windows. If you have a Linux box at home, you will probably be running Apache as well. I followed these instruction which I got from webstuffcan.com. These instructions are for Apache, so if you use Apache, this will make sense to you. If you use something different like I do, then you might have to do some Googling to see how to do the same things with your web server software, but it can be done.

Step 1 – Download and install Perl distribution
Download Windows x86 version of Active Perl from ActiveState site. Install with default configuration except the directory which I recommend to be set to “C:\usr\”.

Step 2 – Download and install Apache server
Download latest Apache server for Windows from http://httpd.apache.org/. Install it under any folder with port 80 as the HTTP port . Setting port to 80 is important since most companies only allow port 80 access. If you get any error in binding to port 80, probably you have something else listening on it. If your ISP blocks port 80 like mine, use a different port like 8080. You will have to specify the port in the url if you use something other than 80. An example of a URL with an alternate port is http://example.com:8080.

Step 3 – Configure Apache server
Now we need to configure Apache to enable CGI.

Locate #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi in httpd.conf (located inside apache subfolder conf) and remove the hash(#) in front.

Locate the “you set DocumentRoot to” string in httpd.conf. Under that you will see Option directive. Change it to Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews

Step 4 – Download and install CGIProxy (nph-proxy)
Download CGIProxy (nph-proxy) from http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/nph-proxy.cgi.txt. Rename the file to nph-proxy.cgi and copy it to Apache’s document root (htdocs). Now change the first line in nph-proxy.cgi to #!C:\usr\perl\bin\perl.exe

Start Apache from the bin folder (httpd.exe). Now open a browser session and point to http://localhost/nph-proxy.cgi. If you get no errors, you should be good to go.

Find the public IP address of your home connection. This can be viewed by browsing to WhatIsMyIP.com. Now from your office computer browse to http://IP ADDRESS/. If you used a different port, use http://IP ADDRESS:port number. If you really want to be spiffy, sign up for free a Dynamic DNS account, and set your home router to automatically update it with your public IP. (Google port forwarding on your router to make all of this work).

Happy MySpacing!

Originally posted on Bauer-Power by El Di Pablo

General

Archive for June, 2007