I’ve written before about how good Nokia PC Suite is at connecting mobiles to Windows is but I’ve found a new use for it. Moving contacts and other information from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.

For all the attractions of Outlook, the big problem was moving all my information from one to another. It’s not a small job and accuracy is important. Sadly there didn’t seem to be any utilities for this with prices within my budget. Creating a text file with the information and then matching the field names didn’t really seem a good use of my time either.

The quick and cheap (assuming you have access to a Nokia phone of some description) solution is to synchronise Notes with the phone and then change the Nokia PC Suite settings to use Outlook instead. Synchronise the phone again and hey presto! All the information is now in Outlook.

It gets even better given the fact that PC Suite works surprisingly well with Bluetooth, so there’s no need to buy a propriety cable.

Posted by Tim Smith on April 1, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

System Restore is helpful, but can be switched off to save hard disk space. That doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore when something goes wrong with the computer, which happened to me this morning.

The computer seemed to be working but none of the web browsers would start properly. Internet Explorer, Firefox (ordinary and portable) and Opera appeared in Task Manager but not on the Desktop.

System Restore seemed like the best solution but I then realised that I’d turned it off.

Thankfully there is an alternative that was not disabled along with System Restore. Restart the computer and press F5 or F8 to show the Windows Advanced Options Menu. Press the up key until ‘Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)’ is highlighted and press Enter.

In my case, Windows loaded without any further messages and all the browsers were working again.

Because I don’t know exactly what went wrong I can’t say when this would work or not, but it’s certainly worth a go if there are problems with Windows that System Restore can’t fix.

Posted by Tim Smith on March 29, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Excel 2003 is limited to three conditions for Conditional Formatting but it is possible to add more by using a macro instead. It’s a little harder than Excel 2007 but it is still possible.

The macro must be set to run every time the spreadsheet is updated so you can’t use the recorder. Our example uses a score sheet for the BBC Weekly Quiz.

Before we start writing any macros, though, we need to decide on the colours for the winner cell because the macro will refer to the colour by its number not the name. A list of the colours can be found at at mvps.org. I printed out the spreadsheet and wrote the numbers down as I found them.

Click on the Tools menu, Macro and then Visual Basic Editor. Alternatively you could press Alt and F11 as the keyboard shortcut to launch the Visual Basic Editor.

Double click on Sheet1(Sheet1) in the section VBAProject (7 days quiz.xls), where the text within the brackets is the name of the spreadsheet. Click on the drop down menu at the top of the right hand section of the window that says (General) and select Worksheet. Next select Change from the drop down menu on the right. Left-click in the gap above the first text [code]End Sub[/code].

Type [code]Dim winner As Range[/code], press Enter and then type [code]Set winner = Range(“E4”), where E4 is the cell with the winners name in. Press Enter and type [code] Dim winnerColor As Integer[/code], press enter twice, type [code]Select Case winner.Value[/code] and press enter.

The following section is where you enter the name of each entrant their colour. For example type [Case “Nick”[/code], press Enter, type [code]winnerColor = 3[/code] and press Enter. Repeat this for as many people are in the quiz.

When all the names are in the list, type [code]End Select[/code], press Enter and type [code]winner.Interior.ColorIndex = winnerColor[/code].

The completed code should look the screenshot on the right.

Click on the save icon in the toolbar at the top of the Visual Basic Editor to save the changes. Click on the Excel icon to the left of the Save icon to return to the spreadsheet. Try changing the scores to test that the correct colours are used.

Apart from having to use the Visual Basic Editor to add or change the entrants to the quiz, the only drawback with this solution is that Excel Macro Security must be set to Medium to allow the macro to run.

Posted by Tim Smith on February 18, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Installing Windows 7 alongside Windows Vista was convenient but I was a little lazy moving my files. When I couldn’t put it off, I dragged and dropped the files from my backup to the Documents folder. Realising that this would take some time, I went off to get some dinner.

Sadly, I returned to find that there had been an out of memory error while copying one of the files. I clicked on Retry but then it happened again.

So I went back to what I’d used to make the backup in the first place, and should have used to restore it, Freefilesync.

This is a clever (and free) utility that can be used for large file transfers or for backups. It compares two folders (including subfolders) and then copies files between them so they become identical.

In this case, where there are gigabytes of files to copy, it has the big advantage that you can save the job and come back to it later on if you are interrupted (I dislike leaving my computer on overnight). It also meant that there was no problem with the fact that I had got halfway through the files when I had to cancel copying.

Files can be compared either by size and date, or by their contents and there are several templates for how to handle situations where a file with the same name and location exists on both sides. These rules can be overruled for individual files.

Just as importantly, you can decide what happens when files are deleted, with the option to copy them to another folder, just to make sure nothing important is lost.

Posted by Tim Smith on January 12, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the dangers of a wireless home network is neighbours using the internet connection that you pay for. The best advice is to enable WPA security on the network to make people enter a password to use the site. I also hide the SSID of the network and am considering using MAC filtering; only allowing access to specific network adapters

This is all well and good, but if you favour the philosophy of ‘Don’t get mad, get even’, you may want to consider the Upside-Down-Ternet. It’s a little technical, but the results are quite funny. If someone connects to the network without permission, all the images in web pages are run through a local webserver, flipping them upside down in the process.

It pretty much makes the web unusable. All you need is a way of hearing the reaction of the connection thieves when you turn it on! Still the idea was made into a cartoon by the ever excellent xkcd.

Posted by Tim Smith on September 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Once upon a time you had a heatsink on the CPU and that was it, not even a fan. These days it seems that a fan or a heatsink is required for the smallest imaginable flat surface. In fact not even that, as I’ve seen heatsinks for capacitors on some motherboards.

Now, this doesn’t normally cause any problems apart from disapproving stares from co-workers wondering why a small helicopter appears to have been started up in the office.

But there is one big problem. Heatsinks make great hand holds, attractive ones at any rate, even if actually they shouldn’t be used as such. This happened to me the other day when fitting some memory to a computer. It was quite high end so there were the obligatory heatsinks but as they matched the colour of the memory slot I didn’t mind too much. As you can just make out the heat sink rises above the actual circuit board. Ever so slightly but no less significantly.

If you’ve ever changed RAM you’ll know that it requires a little bit of force to get it into the appropriate slot. Being in a slight hurry I just pressed on the first available surface, which happened to be the heatsink.

Turning the computer on produced those dreaded BIOS bleeps indicating a problem with the memory. I took it out and had a look. At first I thought that it was just a case of the heat sink coming away from the chips. Sadly the heatsink had taken the memory chips with it. Not something I can repair.

So there’s my cautionary tale.

Always insert memory by pressing on the circuit board. Not the heatsink. And that probably holds for CPUs as well.

Posted by Tim Smith on April 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10)