Date: June 18th, 2007

Author: Susan Harkins

This information is also available as a PDF download.

As I discussed in a previous entry, the My Places bar was introduced in Office 2000. It appears on the left side of the File Open and File Save As dialog box in all Office applications. My Places offers shortcuts to frequently used folders, but customizing it isn’t exactly an intuitive process.

Initially, the bar displays icons for the following Windows folders:

Most of us don’t use these default folders, or not all of them. Fortunately, you can add the folders you do use frequently. In the Open or Save As dialog box, select the folder you want to add from the Look In drop-down list. Then, choose Add To My Places from the Tools menu in the dialog box. To move or resize an icon in the bar, right-click on it and choose the appropriate command from the shortcut menu.

Office applications share one common My Places bar. Changes will show up in all the applications’ dialogs. Note that you can’t alter My Places in Office 2000, and Office XP’s user interface for updating My Places is more limited than 2003’s.

Removing the built-in icons

Removing custom icons from the My Places bar is simple. Right-click on the icon and choose Remove from the shortcut menu.

It isn’t as easy to remove the built-in icons, which is too bad: Deleting them would free up a lot of space for shortcuts you do use. To get rid of those icons, you have to edit the registry.

As always, before you begin editing the registry, be sure you back it up. where to buy viagra in uk Also, while you’re in the registry, don’t change anything unless instructed to in the following steps:

1. From the Windows Start menu, choose Run.

2. Enter regedit and click OK to launch the Registry Editor.

3. As shown in Figure A, expand the nodes to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places

Figure A

4. Update the version number 11.0 in the above key if appropriate. The StandardPlaces key contains the built-in icon values. UserDefinedPlaces contains custom icons. (Don’t worry if you don’t have a UserDefinedPlaces folder yet.)

5. Right-click on the Places key and choose Export. You’re creating a backup file of the current My Places bar. If anything goes wrong, you can simply double-click the file and the Registry will automatically restore the My Places keys, using the contents of the backup file. Give the file an appropriate name and save it where you can find it later. Click Save to create the backup file.

6. In the Places or the StandardPlaces key, double-click on the key you want to disable. Doing so updates the key values to the right. If the icon you double-clicked on has a Show value, double-click on it to display the Edit DWORD Value dialog box.

7. The Value Data value will probably be 2. Replace it with 0 (zero), as shown in Figure B, and click OK.

8. After disabling all the built-in icons that you don’t want to see, exit the Registry Editor.

Figure B

If the built-in icon values don’t include Show, add it as follows:

1. Click on the key that represents the built-in icon you want to disable.

2. Choose New from the Edit menu and select DWORD Value. The Registry will display a new value in the pane to the right. Name it Show and press Enter.

3. Repeat steps 6 and 7 above for each key, accordingly.

The results

When you display the Open or Save As dialog box, the built-in icons will be gone, as you can see in Figure C.

Figure C

Unstable My Places

The My Places user interface isn’t particularly stable, so you might experience problems after adding custom shortcuts or disabling the built-in icons. Usually, you can tell that things have gone awry when the Move Up and Move Down commands are grayed out. If this happens, reboot your system. Sometimes, this clears it up. If it doesn’t, and you want to shuffle your shortcuts, return to the registry and reset the Index values for each key, where 1 shifts an icon to the top, 2 positions an icon just below the first shortcut, and so on. Just remember that the custom shortcuts are in the UserDefinedPlaces key.

Date: May 14th, 2008

Author: Greg Shultz

Date: April 23rd, 2008

Author: Greg Shultz

If you’re using MSN Messenger as your chat and videoconferencing tool, you may never use Windows Messenger anymore and have removed it from the startup group to keep it out of your way. However, you may have seen it pop up on occasion and had to struggle with closing it down. The reason that Windows Messenger makes these impromptu appearances is that Outlook, Outlook Express and even some Microsoft Web pages can still make it load automatically. Fortunately, where can i buy viagra online you can banish Windows Messenger from your desktop by making an alteration to the local group policy with the Group Policy Editor. Here’s how:

Note: This tip applies only to Windows XP Professional.

Date: February 20th, 2008

Author: Greg Shultz

If what is viagra you’ve ever wanted to create your own font or maybe just a special character — for example, a character showing your initials for when you wish to approve documents with your “signature” — you can easily create your own special characters using a hidden Windows XP tool called the Private Character Editor. Here’s how:

Once you save your new character, you can access it using the Character Map tool. Here’s how:

1. Press [Windows]R to open the Run dialog box.
2. Type charmap in the Open text box and click OK.
3. When the Character Map appears, select the Font drop-down list and select All Fonts (Private Characters).
4. Select your character, click the Select button, and then click the Copy button.

You can now paste your font character in any document that you want.

Date: May 9th, 2008

Author: John Sheesley

It has taken Microsoft four years to ship another service pack for Windows XP. After all that time, you might think that they’d get it right. However, even as what is viagra used for SP3 went to RTM, problems cropped up with SP3, including problems that it caused with Microsoft’s own Dynamics line of software.

With the practically unlimited hardware and software combinations that are out there, you can’t necessarily blame Microsoft if things break when they ship something as significant as a service pack. Even simple patches and fixes can sometimes break things. That’s why it’s often a good idea not to configure Automatic Updates on Windows software. You need to have a strategy in place to deal with updates and to test them in advance.

Where to begin?

Of course, in some cases users can receive updates automatically and you don’t have to worry about them. For lower-level users doing noncritical work, you may think you can save yourself some time by just enabling Automatic Updates. Usually the places where updates and service packs cause the most damage is where you’re using custom applications or rely a lot on non-Microsoft solutions. So for those users, you may want to have a testing regiment in place before you allow them to receive updates. The main difficulty with such a strategy is that you can spend a lot of time doing triage.

It’s often easier to have a blanket policy in place. Either allow Automatic Updates for everyone, hope for the best, and deal with the fallout, or block updates for all users and distribute them on an as-needed basis once you’re sure they work properly.

Do-it-yourself distribution

It’s a gamble which is the better strategy. In the short term, certainly the most labor-intensive option is to block automatic updates and distribute them yourself. If you’ve standardized the workstations in your organization, you should keep back a representative machine with typically installed software. Apply the patches and do some testing yourself. If everything seems to be fine, then you can push the patches and service packs out.

Microsoft helps with the blocking of XP SP3 and Vista SP1 with the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit. Even if you have Automatic Updates installed, this tool will prevent them from loading the target service packs for up to a year. This gives you the flexibility of allowing Automatic Updates without having to worry about dealing with bad results from the service packs.

Another alternative is to set up your own update server and redirect workstation updates to it. Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Services will help you get that job done. Third parties create update services as well, such as PatchLink, PatchQuest, and Patch Authority.

Finally, you can also just create individual MSI files for each patch or update and then push them out via Group Policy. This takes a little more effort than the other solutions, but it gives you the maximum flexibility about who gets what and when. If you don’t like Active Directory and Group Policy, you can use things like ZENworks and LANDesk to do essentially the same thing.

Avoid fixes that break things

Service packs and updates have the ability to introduce as many problems as they fix. As an IT leader, you need to have a strategy in place before you deploy them. You may get lucky and not encounter any problems. However, it’s just as likely that when the updates fix one thing they break something else along the way. Do some testing in advance, and you can save yourself time in the long run.