Replies

Thanks for your fast reply, both MaryJ and Dave. However, I did already see the pages you mentioned – I saw them and presumably didn’t understand them! None of the features missing from XP Home seemed necessary to me.

And in many ways still don’t. Being a small business, we really don’t need many/most of the facilities listed on it. For instance, access control, centralised administration, group policy, roaming user profiles, file encryption, remote administration, user permissions — none of these do we use or need.

As a small business we all work off each others’ computer, we don’t use passwords (those pesky asterisks), we have one single password, made of metal, that fits in the office door (it’s called a front door key, and everyone has a cooy) and setting up network management is more trouble than it’s worth. We use MS Proxy server for joint internet access (this was set up before Win98SE’s shared internet access came on the scene) and MS Exchange 5.5, and we only tend to log in under our own names on another’s computer when we want to check our own email on Outlook.

Experienced ‘networkies’ might be aghast, but our NT network has got along fine for over 3 years without all these faciliies. For example, everyone on our network has access to the root hard disk on every other workstation, but they don’t know how to do any harm anyway, and it makes maintenance for me a lot easier.

Every version of Windows since 95 has supported our network without fuss. Until now, it seems. If that’s the case, I feel stuffed by Microsoft. It you are right, looks like I’ll have to do a combination of begging and complaining to my dealer, because I never imagined that in some way XP would be *less* enabled than all its predecessors!

Best regds
Andrew

I’m looking to input new contacts data, creating a new outlook contacts form to do this, rather than importing from an existing database. Everyone who’ll need access already has Outlook 2000 on their machines and is familiar with it, and I’m wary of creating yet another program to install and support in our business. I’ve attached a txt file showing the fields probably needed. I suspect it’ll be a simple one-day job to create the form. I certainly hope so!

Thanks. That looks like a great resource. I hope I’m not the first person ever to ask about this…

There was a neat little utility called ost2pst which – uh – converts an .ost to a .pst. I bought it a year ago as a distress purchase when a ‘consultant’ screwed up our Exchange 5.5 upgrade and I was reduced to recovering our workstation ost files. The first version I got worked buggily and unsatisfactorily, and while they bug-hunted they sent me a command line version of a later version. It worked ok and I recovered the files I wanted. And it was a hefty but reasonable (for a distress purchase) $80. I had to chase, but several months later I finally got the GUI version, a compact 100k exe file, and keep it ‘just in case’, although I like to think my backing up is more secure now!

Today I’ve just read the latest woody’s office watch which tells about officerecovery.com, which does the same job as ost2pst. I went back to ost2pst.com and found myself redirected to officerecovery.com, so presume they are the same people. But YIKES! the price!!! It’s now an utterly unreasonable $500 for a single user! I’m a capitalist and think they are entitled to charge what they like, but I find it hard to recommend the product at even half that price. Of course, that assumes that you aren’t trying to salvage your job in the face of a botched Exchange backup! I trust that the product is better debugged and functioning correctly by now.

“One JUST needs to be more carful when double clicking.”

Ouch! One man’s laziness is another’s motor-skills disability, as I was saying only the other day to a carful of dysleksi… dislexacs… illiterates!

I don’t know that any of the proffered solutions meets my objections, but many thanks for all your contributions (and those yet to come). I presume Microsoft never thought to implement the disabling of in-place renaming.

I suppose if I switch my computer to web-style performance that’ll niftily sidestep the problem, but at the expense of having to train myself into a new paradigm. On the other hand, I’d rather switch my browser over to double-clicking on hyperlinks, to avoid the marked frequency with which I click on the wrong links on a web page.

I do try to click on icons, but they are so small, and besides, as one who prefers to work with words rather than pictures, I would prefer to click on words anyway — they are so much more intuitive to me, since filenames are all different, whereas the icons I need to click on are mostly the same.

But that’s a whole new doctoral thesis on the computer interface…

Hmm, strange — I don’t get a choice in the Format menu off the html editor to change the format to ‘plain text’. The menu options include Theme, Autoformat, Style and Frames, but not ‘Format’. Hold on, I just realised: I’m using Wordmail! I tried removing that in Options/MailFormat, and sure enough it gives me the choice to reply in text. But I’d still rather use Wordmail (same interface and tools as Word). I guess I’ve got no choice. Oh well, Wordmail always was a kludge, eh?

If what you say is true (I don’t doubt you) then the effect is that I cannot use Outlook to keep my personal and work email apart. Without a tedious switching between them, ending an outlook session and restarting, all my personal email is stamped with my work address (or vice versa), and this has a cascading effect on folder rules etc. 🙁

I’m using 2000, and am on a notebook that shuttles between an Exchange 5.5 (office) and a standalone (home) environment. Is ‘IMO’ standalone? is that compatible with Exchange?

JamesB’s answer is perfect! Thanks. So simple and obvious. But the words “thumbnail view” aren’t in Explorer Help, which is presumably why a KB article was needed.