Tip o’ the Week #40 – monitoring your PC’s innards

Posted on July 1, 2011 by ewand

Everyone can see their PC slow down inexplicably, but getting to the bottom of why can be tricky. It could be an occasional task that’s running (like an update being applied to Anti-Virus software), or perhaps something more sinister is going on – a badly constructed web page causing IE to use up system resources, even a virus doing its dirty work. Or maybe it’s just Outlook deciding that it needs to do some lengthy maintenance to large data files.

There are plenty of tools built into Windows 7 that will help tell you what is happening – such as the “CPU Meter” desktop Gadget (right-click on desktop, choose Gadgets, and drag it onto the desktop to see a realtime view of how your computer’s processor – CPU- is performing, and how much memory is currently in use).

If you want to get deeper under the hood, there’s always Performance Monitor or its new friend, Resource Monitor (just go to start menu, type “Resource” and you’ll find it).

A quick and relatively simple way of checking what’s hogging your PC’s performance, is the Task Manager tool – you can start it by pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and choosing Start Task Manager from the list, or right-click on the taskbar and see the same option, or (the quickest and easiest way), simply press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.

Task Manager gives you the ability to see which applications or processes are using the main resources on the machine, and if necessary, gives you the ability to close them down. It’s possible to add other columns to the list, so you could see how much disk I/O each process is generating (so if your laptop’s hard disk is thrashing the whole time, you might see which app is causing it). Resource Monitor adds another layer of detail, and can be started from within Task Manager’s “Performance” tab.

The Über-Monitor
If you’re feeling like all these namby-pamby built-in monitoring tools are too high level, you need ProcessExplorer. This tool came from a company (called Winternals) which Microsoft bought a few years ago, ostensibly to bring on board some nice free tools (and some that now sit in MDOP) and to get the brain of its chief technologist, one Mark Russinovich, who is now a “Technical Fellow” in Microsoft. A Jolly Technical Fellow, no less.

“Technical Fellow” is the highest technical level in Microsoft, equivalent to Corporate VP, and is bestowed on a few legendary folk. The guy who invented Vax/VMS and designed Windows NT? Check. The guys who developed (with a few friends) the graphical UI, distributed computing, ethernet, the laser printer and the mouse? Take a bow, Butler, Chuck.

If you ever get to see Mark give a talk at TechEd, you’ll realise just how deep his knowledge goes. Here are recordings of some of his talks – there’s also a TechEd introduction to some of the tools, here.

Process Explorer lets you see not only what services/processes are hogging the machine, but what is causing them to do it – as with any such tools, you could do a great deal of harm by killing off the wrong thing… but if you fire it up and simply have a look, it’s quite interesting…

For the true die-hards, it’s possible (through the Options menu) to “Replace Task Manager” so that ProcExp is fired up by the same means (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC etc) that Task Manager was.

This could be the new measure of the true geek – only Process Explorer users would qualify.

Tip o’ the Week #39 – Multi-monitor with Win7

Posted on June 24, 2011 by ewand

If you sit at a shared desk with a monitor on it, but are content to just use your laptop screen, then this tip is for you. Also, if you use your laptop and display the same image on both its internal panel and an attached external screen, listen up.

Multi-mon in Windows 7 – the ability to extend your desktop to cover multiple screens – is quite possibly its killer feature. Seriously. I bought a 2^nd widescreen monitor for my home PC, just because it’s so useful.

Using multiple monitors couldn’t be simpler – plug in to your laptop (or plug a 2^nd monitor into your desktop if you have one – many desktop PCs now have a VGA and a DVI connector, so you could drive one of each), and press WindowsKey-P to bring up the display selector, if necessary (since windows 7 does a good job of remembering your previous settings, you should only have to do this once).

(If you’re running a laptop with Windows 7, you do not need to do Fn-F7 or whatever to send the display to a projector. Same thing goes with managing an external display – Win-P does most of what you’ll need).

Shortcut keys are indispensible when managing multiple monitors – here are a few:

WndKey+SHIFT+ Left / Right arrow – switches the current window between the screens*
WndKey+Left / Right arrow – docks the current window to the left of the screen it’s on

(flick a window to the 2^nd display with Wnd+Shift+Left then press Wnd+Left to dock)

WndKey+Home – minimises / maximises all windows other than the active one

*actually, it’s possible to have an array of screens – these key combinations merely move the window one along the array.
Here’s someone taking things to extreme, I feel…

Now, sometimes you won’t have monitors side-by-side – but that’s OK. Right-click on your desktop and choose Screen Resolution and you can move things around a bit…

In the example above, the 2^nd display is offset to the top left and has a different resolution (1440×900 vs 1400×1050) and aspect ratio (16:9 widescreen vs 4:3 standard) to the main laptop screen. This happens to be my 2^nd monitor when working at home. You can drag & drop the position of the 2^nd monitor in relation to the primary one, and it gets saved for future – so your mouse moves appropriately between the two, or you can drag windows between (and even span) the two screens.

In the office, I use a 4:3 monitor (pictured below). The screen size/resolution can make for some interesting effects in comparison with the laptop panel, but here I have it set to stack the two screens vertically. Really handy when working on a couple of different things at once, or even when showing something to another user – far easier for them to see it on the big screen than squint at the laptop.

Most obscure tip of the week – WndKey+SHIFT+Up arrow –stretches a window’s height to span both monitors if they’re stacked vertically as shown above. Nope, I can’t think of too many uses for it either.

Tip o’ the Week #37 – Quickly create a new task

Posted on June 17, 2011 by ewand

If you’re super-efficient and use Outlook’s tasks functionality a lot, here’s a tip that might help you create a new task in double-quick time.

Obviously, you can create tasks directly from Outlook itself (clicking on the New Items ribbon menu option, by pressing CTRL-N when you’re in the Tasks view itself, or by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-K if you’re anywhere else in Outlook).

If you’re in OneNote, position the cursor next to the action item or other text that you want to make a task from, and either click the giant Tasks flag on the Ribbon, or else use the keyboard shortcuts that are displayed on the menu.

Pretty useful so far, eh?

Well, here’s a final method for creating new Outlook tasks that is accessible from anywhere – if you’re reading a web page or a Word doc, it can help you immediately fire up a new Outlook task without having to navigate into Outlook to do it.

The tip uses a Shortcut for an application – a technology that was introduced with Windows 95 and even has its roots in the old Win3.x “Program Manager”.

The simplest way to create a shortcut is to look at your desktop (WinKey+D will instantly minimise all windows).
Actually you might want to minimise everything, then ALT-TAB back to this email, then
use WindowsKey+LeftArrow to dock it to one side, leaving an area of exposed desktop.

Now, right-click on the desktop and select New -> Shortcut then start typing in \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Outlook.exe (you’ll see as you type, that the full names of each directory get auto-completed for you, so you could just use the up/down keys to select the right one, and by pressing “\” again, you’ll be able to carry on typing the name of the next folder…).

Once you’ve got OUTLOOK.EXE, hit Next, then give the shortcut a meaningful name (like New Task). Now, right-click on the shortcut, change the icon if you like (to be less generic Outlook and more Task-oriented), and add /c ipm.task to the end of the command line. This tells Outlook that you want to start directly in a new item window – you could later create other shortcuts with other types if you like (ipm.note for email, ipm.contact, ipm.appointment, ipm.stickynotes etc…).

Now click on the “Shortcut Key” box in the properties dialog and press whatever combination of shortcut keys you can remember: CTRL-ALT-T might be a good place to start. Press OK to finish, and Robert’s your father’s brother. Now press that key combo from anywhere and it should fire up a new Task window to the fore.

Other Outlook command line switches are available… if you’re feeling brave.

Tip o’ the Week #36 – Using bookmarks in long emails

Posted on June 10, 2011 by ewand

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” ~Thomas Jefferson

Brevity. That’s one, important, word.
Better to write a short, thorough email, than to overwhelm with info no-one will ever read (something a few folks in Redmond have yet to appreciate, perhaps). As Blaise Pascal noted, it takes longer to create a short letter than to write a long one.

If, however, you find you do need to write lenghty emails, especially ones with lots of information, you might find it worthwhile looking into Bookmarks. Just like in long documents in Word, it’s possible to create reference points within an email, then provide links to jump directly to those places.

Start by selecting a place in your email you want to bookmark (by selecting a piece of text, or just putting the cursor in the approprite place)
Now, on the Insert tab in the Ribbon, Look in Links | Bookmark
Type a name for the bookmark you want to add, then press “Add” (note – if you already have existing bookmarks and you just hit Add, it will actually replace the one you currently have selected … not ideal but worth keeping an eye on when you’re adding 2^nd, 3^rd etc bookmarks)
When you’ve finished adding the bookmarks to places in the document, you can link to them and the reader will jump straight there – you may want to add a list of headines at the top, or a line of short links such as…

brevity | join & leave | history

Simply select the text you want to link from, go to Insert | Hyperlink and instead of linking to a URL, choose the “Place in this Document” option, then pick the appropriate bookmark.

Tip o’ the Week #31 – the lost art of the .EXE name

Posted on June 3, 2011 by ewand

As has been mentioned in a couple of earlier ToW’s, it’s often quicker to use the keyboard to do things, than to take your hands off the keyboard and fish about for a mouse or other means of pointer manipulation. In the vast majority of cases, for example, whenever there’s a box that lets you type some text and an “OK” button to accept it, pressing ENTER will have the same effect as finding your pointer and clicking on the button, and will save you precious seconds in so doing.

An easy way of shaving more seconds from the daily grind is to remember the old names of executable files, rather than relying on finding an icon in the Start menu and clicking on it. Remember the days of DOS-style “8.3” filenames, where programs would have a .EXE (or even a .COM) extension? If you entered the bit preceding the “.” in a command prompt, then DOS or Windows would just run the program (without needing to add the .EXE bit).

Well, some things never change. Windows preserves the same ability to run an executable by entering its name, and in many cases, the “path” to where that executable lives (in the file system) will be included in the locations that Windows will look for appropriate files.

Maybe this is easier to “do” than to explain – try pressing WndKey-R, which will bring up the “Run” prompt that used to be on the Start menu but is no longer. At this point, you can ENTER the names of any of your favourite programs…

WINWORD
EXCEL
POWERPNT
CALC
NOTEPAD
COMMUNICATOR (note that all of the above have their legacy in pre-Win95 days of 8.3 file names, so their main executable file name was <=8 chars in length… well, Office Communicator being a more modern app has no such history – some internal Windows commands still preserve the 8.3 format even though there’s been no need to do so for 15 years)
OUTLOOK (you can sometimes add command-line switches to alter the behaviour of the app you’re looking to run – Outlook has a myriad, normally used for troubleshooting purposes)
IEXPLORE
ONENOTE
STIKYNOT

All of the above are mainstream productivity apps, but there are hunders of Windows system applications that could be occasionally useful, too:

EVENTVWR
PERFMON
CMD

In fact, you can launch all of these by just pressing the WindowsKey to bring up the start menu, and type in the name of the program and hit enter… but you don’t get the history of previous commands entered, which can be handy (eg to open a Remote Desktop session to another machine, you could enter “MSTSC /V <machinename>” and all of the recent entries will be recalled in the Most Recently Used list, and can be selected with a deft down-arrow or two, followed by ENTER.

Tip o’ the Week #30 – Sending emails from the past

Posted on May 27, 2011 by ewand

Following on from ToW #9, regarding delaying sending email, this week’s episode was asked for by another reader, since he eagle-eyed-ly spotted that the email was send on one date but didn’t arrive in his inbox until a week later.

Aha! Now, it’s possible in Outlook to set that a message should not be delivered until a specific time but there are two distinct behaviours to this function.

Nowadays (since Outlook 2003, in fact), the default behaviour of Outlook is to be in “cached mode” – ie. mostly everything you do within Outlook happens to a cached copy of your Exchange mailbox, meaning the performance of Outlook in not dependent on the availability or speed of network access to the Exchange server.

In most cases, this is a great solution, however one downside is that that “Outbox” folder where email is held before being sent, doesn’t synchronise with the server, and is unique to the Outlook cached mode “profile” – so if you choose to send email at a later time and you’re in cached mode, it will only be sent if your PC is online.

The 2^nd behaviour is if you’re using Outlook in “online mode” where the Outbox is a special folder that lives on the server, and mail sitting in it will be processed by the Exchange server at the appropriate time, regardless of whether you’ve got a client PC online or not.

If you need to regularly send mail at a time when you’re offline, the trick is to set up a second Outlook profile and use to actually do the sending… prepare in advance, hit send, and then amaze your colleagues by not only sending mail through a time vortex, but at a time when you’re known to be in the air/on a beach/asleep etc.

To set up a 2^nd Profile

Go into the Mail application in Control panel (you’ll see it if you just type “Mail” at the start menu in Windows 7), and choose Show Profiles.
Click “Add”, give your new profile a meaningful name (like “Online mode”) then enter you name, email address and domain password (assuming you’re on Outlook 2007 or 2010, this info will be enough to “Auto Discover” where your server is) to the profile wizard…
After the wizard has found your server and says the account is configured, tick the “Manually configure server settings” box in the bottom left, then click next.
On the following screen, clear the checkbox that says “Use Cached Exchange Mode” then hit Finish.

Et voila! The only challenge now is, how to get Outlook to actually use this profile?

Back at the Mail configuration applet, you can choose to have Outlook prompt you for which profile to use every time it starts, and set which one will appear by default – in this case “Outlook” is the standard profile in Cached Mode, and a simple hit of the enter key will select that option when Outlook starts up.

If this is a once-in-a-blue-moon requirement, you could simply leave the setting to always use the Cached Mode profile, and then when you want to go into Online Mode, simply close Outlook, go into Control Panel, change this setting to prompt you, then start Outlook again (and maybe reverse that procedure when you’re finished)

Now when you start Outlook up in “online” mode, you might see that it’s a bit more sluggish, since everything you do (open an email, open an attachment in an already-opened-email, sort a folder etc) requires that the client and the server send potentially large amounts of data back & forth. So it’s best to limit your “online” mode bit to as short as possible. You may notice that the status bar now says “Online with…” rather than “Connected to Microsoft Exchange”.

Sending mail from the past

The best way to do this is to draft the email you want to send when you’re in Cached Mode, and make sure a copy of it is in your Drafts folder.

Close Outlook down*
Restart, then select the online profile
open the email in question from your Drafts folder
change the “Do not deliver before” option in the ribbon’s Option tab | Delay Delivery
hit send, and watch the email stay in the Outbox … now you can close Outlook down.

You won’t see the pending email in your Outbox when you return to cached mode, since that Outbox folder is coming from your PC and not the server. You will see the email sitting in the Outbox folder if you log in again using Outlook & the Online profile.

*on closing Outlook, you may need to close other applications that use Outlook, or wait a little for all the addins that Outlook could be running (like GSX), to shut down – if when attempting to start Outlook in online mode, and you don’t get prompted for a profile as you might be expecting, that means Outlook is still running.

If this happens, try closing Outlook again and check in Task Manager to make sure OUTLOOK.EXE isn’t still there. Top tip for getting Task Manager running quickly, even if Windows Explorer has hung… CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. There you go, multiple tips for the price of one…

Tip o’ the Week #29 – Filtering email to reduce the noise

Posted on May 20, 2011 by ewand

Anyone who gets lots of email will appreciate the importance of Outlook rules. Most rules run on the Exchange server, but some (like rules which move messages to a PST folder on your PC) will run client-side.

In Outlook 2010, the Rules settings are available from the File menu (or Backstage).

Over the last few versions, Outlook has made it easier to create rules – if you right-click on an email, you can now create rules to move email sent by the orginator or mail sent to the destination (such as a Distribution List). This can help you filter out the noisier DL’s (like Ltd Social) into a sub folder so they don’t clutter up your inbox.

If it’s Not Direct to Me -> take it away for now
This tip might take a few minutes to set up – you’d be well advised to print this message out, since you might not be able to refer back to it whilst you’re editing your rules.

A great use of Rules is to filter out any email which isn’t sent directly to you, or isn’t handled by another rule to move it to a specific place. Does that sound confusiing? If so, the logic is:
If <this new email> is sent to a DL that I want to move to a specific folder, then

Move it to the folder, and stop doing anything more with it.

Otherwise,

Move the email to the “not direct to me” folder
unless it’s sent directly to me or to a DL (in which case leave it alone, in my Inbox)

The key part here is the “Stop processing more rules” action within the Outlook rules wizard. After you’ve created the rule (through the one-click option above, perhaps), you can go back in and edit it, adding other actions or conditions. On the same part of the wizard that says to move the message to a folder, you can also stipulate that Outlook stops doing anything further with that message after it gets moved (otherwise, it could be moved to one place, then moved again to a different one).

If you arrange your rules so that each “move to a folder” type rule also stops processing any more (indicated in the rules list by the hammer/spanner icon on the right), then set the final rule in the list to be the one that dictates whether a message will stay in your inbox, or whether it gets moved to one other folder.

This way, you can keep the most important emails coming into your inbox, and the “FYI” type DLs that aren’t noisy enough to earn their own sub-folder, will all get swept up into one place.

Happy rule tweaking!

Tip o’ the Week #28 – Windows Key is your friend

Posted on May 13, 2011 by ewand

Some people love keyboard shortcuts – producivity guru David Allen (not to be confused with the the late comedian) recommends, as part of his Getting Things Done methodology, that learning a few keyboard shortcuts will make everyone more productive in doing routine things more quickly. ToW #10 highlighted some Outlook shortcuts that can make everyone’s life better, but there are many that apply to Windows and other applications that are worth remembering.

Using the clipboard
Let’s start simply – copy (CTRL-C), cut (CTRL-X) and paste (CTRL-V) apply to pretty much every application in Windows. There’s no need to take your hand off the keyboard and go for the mouse right-click if you’re looking to manipulate text. These key combinations can trace their lineage all the way back to Xerox PARC, where pretty much everything we understand as the modern computer was invented or perfected and implemented (graphical UI, mouse, network, laser printer…)

Did you know you can also use CTRL-Insert for copy, SHIFT-Insert to paste and SHIFT-Del for cut? The handy thing there is that most keyboards have a shift and control key on the right hand side, near INS and DEL keys… so you can cut, copy & paste with your right hand only… add to that the standard commands to select text – CTRL <– and CTRL –> moves the cursor one word backwards and forwards, and holding shift down at the same time selects the text from where you were starting from. So, holding shift, and selecting a few words, followed by CTRL-C or SHIFT-Insert, and you’ve copied them to the clipboard. SHIFT-Home selects everything to the left of the cursor on the current row, & SHIFT-End selects everything to the right.

Windows Key in Windows 7

But Windows 7’s got a whole host of shortcut keys that can make life easy, from WndKey-L to lock your keyboard or Wnd-“+” and Wnd-“-“ to zoom in and out. What about:

· Wnd – rightarrow, which docks the current window to the right of the screen

· Wnd – leftarrow, which docks to the left

· Wnd – uparrow, maximises the current window…

… and the reverse, Wnd–downarrow, restores it again, or minimises it to the taskbar)

· SHIFT-Wnd–rightarrow and SHIFT-Wnd–leftarrow moves the current window between two monitors (if you have them) or between your laptop and the projector (if you have it set to “Extend” rather than “Duplicate”, a choice you get when you use Wnd–P to switch screens).

With a bit of practice on some of these, you can take several minutes off repeated processes like editing a document or an email – just think how much more you could Get Things Done with nothing but some keyboard shortcuttery?

There are many, many other shortcuts – more details here.

Tip o’ the Week #26 – multiple time zones in Outlook Calendar

Posted on May 6, 2011 by ewand

Sometimes you need to create appointments that will make sense when you’re in a different time zone – it helps to use Outlook, Exchange and its phone integration to put relevant stuff in the calendar, so you can make sure you’re in the right place and at the right time.

Now there are a couple of ways to make Outlook more timezone-friendly – if you right-click on the time bar to the left of the calendar detail, then a fly-out menu will let you Change Time Zone. An alternative, can be found in the “Time Scale” option on the View tab when looking at the Calendar. As with many things, there are several ways to skin the proverbial cat…

If you choose to change the time zone, Outlook displays its options dialog, which lets you select the current time zone (and also sets the whole PC into that time zone so you needn’t change the PC clock separately), but helpfully also lets you display a second zone, and give both a label so you can see which is which…

If you edit an appointment, it’s also possible to show multiple time zones, and to set the destination time zone for an appointment to take place. In other words, if I’m arranging to meet someone at 7pm in Washington DC, I don’t need to manually figure out what time that is in the UK, I just set the time zone of the appointment to be Eastern Daylight Time.

As it happens, Outlook always converts an appointment back to “UTC”* – what we still know as GMT in the UK, is actually the base for all appointments, and then a time offset is applied depending on whether the time zone(s) in question have Daylight Saving Time in effect, etc. So an appointment is never 7pm in Washington DC, it’s actually at 00:00 then -5 is offset, since their time zone is UTC-5.

It’s even possible to have an appointment which starts and finishes in a different time zone. The only example I can think of this is a flight, but there may be others. Suggestions on a postcard please…

* UTC doesn’t actually stand for anything – the ITU standards body wanted a single worldwide abbreviation; English speakers wanted “Coordinated Universal Time” or CUT. French speakers wanted “temps universel coordonné” or TUC. Unable to separate the two factions, they compromised and chose UTC.

Tip o’ the Week #24: Invite yourself to others’ meetings

Posted on April 17, 2011 by ewand

Have you ever heard that a meeting is happening, that you feel you should be attending, but weren’t invited to? Have you ever asked someone “could you forward me that meeting?” so that it appears in your calendar?

Well, there’s no need to place the action on the other person – with Outlook’s side/side calendar view, you can do it yourself.

In the example here, Andrew has a meeting I want to attend. If I view his calendar side/side, and simply drag & drop the meeting to the left, it will add it to my own calendar.

At the point of “dropping” the meeting, Outlook will prompt if you want to send an Acceptance (just like if you’d opened a meeting request you’d been sent), and you’re added to the list of attendees so the originator of the meeting will see that you’re now joining them.

So no surprises when you walk into the room.

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