Posts tagged Question
How do I manually back up my Outlook PST file?
May 10th
So I got a frantic phone call yesterday from a buddy of mine who lost his PST file due to a crashed hard drive.
The thing is this guy normally backs up EVERYTHING! I was shocked he didn’t have another copy ready to go.
When I asked him why he didn’t back up his PST file regularly he kind of stared at me like a deer caught in my headlights and e said:
“Whats a PST? Is that like pssssst?” He made a come here gesture with his finger and I laughed.
So here we go! Your PST file is where Outlook stores your information like email and calendar information, on your local machine. These directions will do for all outlooks 97 or better.
First things first; we need to shutdown outlook and locate your PST file. So just follow these easy steps and you will be golden.
- Search your PC for *.PST and make sure you select search hidden files and folders is checked. Also make sure there is a check box next to search system folders.
- Highlight your PST file on the right it will be the one with the most recent access date.
- Right Click — Copy
- Paste your file to a USB memory stick, dvd, cd-r or a network share. (Make sure outlook is closed or you will not be able to perform this step!)
You can now rest easily that all of your contacts and saved email pictures of your friend with a felt tipped mustache will be saved forever – or until you destroy the disk!
Come back for how to archive data out of your PST to make it smaller.
_TheBackedUpAdmiN_
Can I Change The Inbox Font in Microsoft Outlook?
Apr 10th
I have this user who just got upgraded to a new laptop. When he logged in for the first time and opened Outlook, he was shocked. He said the fonts were way to small (Apparently he is as blind as a bat, or just likes larger fonts). Anyway, he called me to fix it.
If you run into the same thing, here is what you do in both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007:
Outlook 2003:
- Click on View > Arrange By > Current View > Customize Current View
- Click on the ‘Other Settings’ button
- Click on the Column Font, Row Font and AutoPreview buttons to change your fonts
- Click OK, then OK again, your fonts should now be changed in your inbox list.
Outlook 2007:
Note: Microsoft made this a little more intuitive in this version
- Click on View > Current View > Customize Current View
- Click on the ‘Other Settings’ button
- Click on the Column Font, Row Font and Auto Preview buttons to change your fonts
- Click OK, then OK again, your fonts should now be changed in your in-box list.
I hope this helps some of you out there. If this doesn’t work for you there are some alternatives such as glasses, contacts or even lasik surgery. Good luck!
Written by El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power.net
Codec issue for videos downloaded via Bit Torrent. Why dont my videos have audio?
Apr 2nd
Today’s question is a very common problem that most of you have had one time or another. It is especially annoying if you are about to sit down to watch a video and you can’t… Then you have to venture out onto the world wide web to try and hunt down a solution.
Look no further pirate video lover…
Help me Admin.
I downloaded some videos my family would love to watch. My buddy showed me how to use Azerus (a Bit Torrent client). I downloaded the files just like we did on his computer. They finished but the audio doesn’t work on one file and neither the video or the audio work on another.
Both files played on my friends computer but he is away for a few days now. I can’t go home without these files working! Please help.
Desperate in Denver
The first thing I recommended to Desperate in Denver was to download a free utility called G-Spot to analyze the file and also more often than not the K-lite codec pack fixes your issues and it is a free download here.
Anyone have any other answers to the codec issue of the day? What do you do when your precious educational videos pornography Bootlegs won’t work?
Pain Free Backup: Using WordPress to Back Up Blogger – Also Can Be Used For Migration
Mar 4th
So we flopped around Google’s website yesterday and stared in disbelief as the only answer to backup or export your data still seemed like a crappy work-a-round.
But it looks like WordPress one up’ed Google’s Blogger by adding an Import feature to their WordPress 2.0!
It also works with LiveJournal, TypePad and MovableType.
It only works with NEW blogger templates so if you haven’t upgraded – Now is the time to do it!
They will also let you import your categories as tags – selectively! Cool stuff. Way to convert users WordPress!
We are in the process of importing all of our data – posts and comments to http://asktheadmin.wordpress.com/ we will be using this as a backup for AskTheAdmin. Not only will this give us a LIVE backup that we can browse to in the even of an catastrophe like yesterday it also lets us play with the platform we will be moving to in the near future.
Mind you as you add more posts they will not be AUTOMATICALLY backed up you will need to REPEAT the process.
So here you go – all simple like. Even A child should be able to do it!
- Create a WordPress blog over @ http://www.wordpress.com/
- Goto Manage – Import
- Choose Blogger
- Give Blogger the go ahead to allow WordPress to grab ALL your data.
- Make sure you select comments and posts – hit the import button and sit back!
- Go play with your new WordPress replica of your Blogger Blog!
1.5 hours in We are about 30% done right now check it out for yourself. We will obviously be redoing the templates – so I don’t even want to hear about how ugly it is (yet!)
4 hours in about 90% done with the posts and then the comments!
Can I get hard drive properties for multiple drives?
Mar 1st
If you are like us you have more than a handful of drive letters residing on your Windows machine. Now here is a time saving tip that will let you see ALL the drives you want properties in a single property window… Wow that’s a mouth full here check out this pic.
By highlighting the drives you want information on and (Control clicking to select multiple drives) then right click… Choose properties and now you can move around the property windows via the tabs – a LOT faster then hitting them up individually. Do you have a different way of getting an overview of your drives?
Need to Rip Dvds to files? Use VLC Media Player!
Feb 23rd
So you have lots of DVD’s that you thought you would always love and want to keep the boxes of on your bookshelf – for everyone to see.
Yeah we know that funny feeling, peoples strange looks give you for your taste in media – but we won’t mention THOSE kind of shows now will we?? We here @ AtA don’t Judge… So here you go weirdo… Rip away!
We all know VLC plays ripped DVD files but did you know it could rip them as well? Surprise Surprise…
The VLC media player (VLC) is a versatile tool. It can handle virtually any media file, it can play network streams such as Internet radio stations, and it can stream media contents across the network. But that’s not all; VLC can also ‘stream’ media to a file in a user-defined format, which makes it a handy transcoding tool. The most obvious use of this feature is to backup your film DVDs, a process that VLC makes straightforward. While VLC doesn’t support so-called DVD shrinking (fitting a film onto a single-layer DVD or even CD), it’s perfectly capable of converting an entire film into a single file that you can play in any media player, including VLC itself.
The following description guides you through the process of transcoding a DVD film into a single MPEG-1, which offers several advantages:
- You can play MPEG files on an older machine without a DVD drive.
- Instead of using original DVDs, you can burn a low-resolution backup copy on a CD.
- When you’re on the move, you can copy the films you want onto your laptop instead of lugging DVDs. This will not only make your luggage lighter, but also improve the laptop’s battery life (the hard disk consumes much less power than the DVD drive).
- If you have a server in your household, you can move your films to it and stream them using VLC around the house (more about that later).
To transcode a DVD, insert it into the DVD drive and launch VLC.
Choose File -> Open disk and select the DVD option in the Disk type section.
Next, you have to select the DVD title and the desired subtitle language. Most DVDs contain multiple titles, and it’s not always obvious which one contains the film. The same is true for subtitles — there is no way of telling what channel number corresponds to which language.
You have two options here: you can either try different combinations and preview the result in VLC, or you can ‘cheat’ the system by using a tool like DVDShrink on Linux or DVDx on Windows. The latter option is more straightforward and less time-consuming. If you are using Linux, use the DVDShrink script to quickly learn the right title and subtitle channel. Launch DVDShrink and press the “Set from DVD” button next to the “Enter the DVD title to rip” field.
This opens the “Titles on this DVD” windows, which contain the list of the available titles. Note the title with the longest playtime (in the figure, it’s Title 2). Repeat this for the subtitles channel.
You can use DVDShrink to quickly locate the film title and the subtitles channel — Click to enlarge With this information in hand, return to VLC and enter the proper values in the appropriate fields.
The next step is to configure the streaming options. Tick the “Stream output” check box and press the Settings button. If you want to see the film during transcoding, tick the “Play locally” check box. Tick the File check box, and specify the file and its path in the Filename field using the Browse button. You need to enter the file name and its extension manually; for example, Rashomon.mpeg. Set Encapsulation Method to MPEG 1, then tick the “Video codec” check box and select mp1v. This enables the Bitrate list, and the default bitrate there is 1024Kbps, which offers a good balance between file size and video quality.
For example, using this bitrate, VLC converts Akira Kurosawa’s 1 hour and 24 minutes black and white film Rashomon into a 700MB MPEG file, which fits nicely onto a standard CD-ROM. Reducing the bitrate results in a smaller file with lower video quality. Next, tick the “Audio codec” check box and select mp3 from the list. As with the video codec, you can also select different audio bitrates. The default is 192Kbps, but you can set it to 128Kbps without any noticeable loss in quality.
To add subtitles, tick the “Subtitles overlay” check box.
Press OK twice to close the windows, and VLC starts transcoding. If you ticked the “Play locally” check box, you can also see the film while waiting for the transcoding to finish.
Tip: VLC is also available as a portable application for Windows. Copy your transcoded films and Portable VLC onto a mobile hard disk and you can watch your favorite films on any computer that’s running Windows.
To learn more about Ripping DVD’s or controlling VLC via a browser check out this article from
[NewsForge]
