SteveOH

This is a great piece of code I found for removing duplicates from Outlook 2007.  Unfortunately, the code I posted months ago no longer functions with Outlook 2007, or at least, stopped working for me.  So just in case, Jean-Claude Stritt wrote this code.  I’ve tested it, it works, and it’s free.  Love it.

You can get it here or from me here (compressed with 7z).

Rise and shine! Follow these 8 tips to start the day refreshed and ready-to-go

By Michele Bender

do in the hour after you get up can help you look and feel your best for the rest of the day.

Tap into the Power Hour

What you

The right moves and foods will give you the focus, stamina, and positive outlook you need to plow through your busy schedule. Plus, you’ll kick-start your metabolism, helping you torch extra calories and melt more fat. Our get-up-and-go routine outlines the latest research-based tips guaranteed to make your morning a true power hour. Here’s how to rise and shine.

1. Cue Energy with Color

“Seeing a bright, vibrant hue when you open your eyes gets your adrenaline going–and that sudden surge of energy helps clear the cobwebs and kicks you into gear,” says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. Put a red, orange, yellow, or fuchsia throw pillow, blanket, or piece of art in the area you first see in the morning, or slip on a robe in one of these shades. You can even make breakfast visually stimulating (and get a nutritional boost) by pouring yourself a glass of antioxidant rich pomegranate or cranberry juice with a sweet slice of orange.

2. Wake Up and See the Roses

Seeing a bouquet of blooms when they first woke up gave women in a new study a mood lift and energy boost that lasted all day, reports Nancy Etcoff, PhD, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard University Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative.

3. Stop Hitting the Snooze Button

There’s truth in the adage “You snooze, you lose.” When you hit snooze, your brain knows it will go off again in a few minutes–so you won’t go into the deeper, more restful stages of slumber. That means you’ll be more tired than if you’d gotten up when it first sounded. A better strategy: “Set your alarm for when you really need to get up,” says Jodi Mindell, PhD, associate director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “That extra, uninterrupted sleep makes you feel more rested and refreshed when you get out of bed.”

4. Picture the Day Ahead

Once you’re awake, close your eyes and picture yourself alert and energetic. “Imagining an activity fires up the same parts of your brain that are used when you actually experience it,” says Dana Lightman, PhD, a behavioral psychologist in Abington, PA. “Thinking positively about the day ahead energizes you.”

5. Drink Instant Energy

Drinking a big glass of water as soon as you get up is a good way to replenish the fluid your body loses overnight, and it provides instant energy. “Everything that happens in your body requires water,” says Holly Andersen, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Without enough of it, your systems have to work harder in every respect–which can cause fatigue.” Indeed, even a 2% drop in water stores can tire you physically and mentally. Starting to sip early also gives you a head start on the 11 cups of water the Institute of Medicine now recommends women consume throughout the day to stay hydrated.

6. Let the Sunshine In

A splash of sunlight makes you feel more awake, so read the paper by a sunny window or step outside for a few minutes while having your coffee. “Daylight signals your biological clock to stop the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that makes you sleepy, and promotes wakefulness,” says James B. Maas, PhD, a professor and past chairman of the department of psychology at Cornell University. It also increases the brain’s level of serotonin, a chemical that boosts mood. If it’s still dark when you get up, consider purchasing a dawn stimulator (from $80; Light Therapy Products), a device that gradually brightens a light source at a preprogrammed time. Set it to create a dawn that breaks a half hour before your usual wake up time and grows to maximum brightness when your alarm goes off–even when your eyes are closed, the light that passes through your lids signals your internal clock to trigger waking neurons in your brain.

7. Give Yourself a Face Rub

“Massaging your face boosts circulation, making it a surefire way to wake up,” says Maggy Dunphy, general manager of the Aria Spa and Club in Vail, CO. Starting at your forehead and working down to your chin, lightly flutter tap or drum your fingertips, varying the velocity, intensity, and location until you’ve touched your entire face. Bonus: These moves give you a quick healthy glow.

8. Have a Romp in the Hay

Physical activity is one of the best ways to shake off grogginess–and having sex boosts your body’s levels of chemicals associated with stamina (testosterone), energy (dopamine), and calmness (oxytocin), says Helen E. Fisher, PhD, a research professor in the department of anthropology at Rutgers University. What a great way to start the day!

I recently came across an application provided by Intel for the purpose of benchmarking NAS devices (Define: Network Attached Storage).  I’ve been looking for a solution to benchmark the new RAID-5 array I created on my Windows Server 2008 server (I love the RAID’s redundancy, but the write speeds are quite low).  I wanted to get a better idea of its performance, as Windows will report 250 – 150 MB READS and 20 – 50 MB WRITES, which is considerably poor considering the 4 drives are individually benchmarked at ~100 MB READS and 60 MB WRITES (They are Western Digital Caviar Blues / RE3 / RE16).

The software can be found here or from Intel here.

System Specifications:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition, SP1
CPU Type: Pentium 4 630, 3000 MHz w/ Hyperthreading
Motherboard Name: Dell Dimension 8400
Motherboard Chipset: Intel Alderwood i925XE
Motherboard Frontside Bus Speed: 800 MHz
System Memory (RAM): 4 GB, Dual Channel
System Memory Speed / Timings: DDR2-533 (266 MHz) / 4-4-4-12
Hard Drive Controller Interface: SATA I (1.5 Gbits / s) = 150 MB/s (maximum)
Hard Drives: Western Digital

• Drive #1 – WDC WD5002ABYS-01B1B (465 GB)
• Drive #2 – WDC WD5002ABYS-01B1B (465 GB)
• Drive #3 – WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B (465 GB)
• Drive #4 – WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B (465 GB)
• Drive #5 – WDC WD800BB-00JHC0 (74 GB) – SYSTEM

Raid Configuration: Software 4 disk RAID-5 (4 x 500GB, 1.36 TB Effective Storage Space)

System Memory Benchmark: Copy – 4790 MB/s, Read – 6266 MB/s, Write – 3341 MB/s, Latency – 92.7 ns
System Processor Benchmark: CPU ZLib – 10592 KB/s, CPU AES  – 3055

Benchmarks completed using Everest Ultimate Edition v4.20.1257

All drives are SATA II (3.0 GB/s) but are running in backwards-capability mode.

The primary roles of the server is to serve files and store backups (File Server) and web and application development and website hosting (Web Server).  I do not stream media, play music from the server or write extremely large amounts of data that are time sensitive.  Therefore, my decision for RAID-5 was based on the space savings (n – 1) storage availability and the redundancy by means of the parity.  I am willing to give up performance (write and read) for storage space and redundancy, but I want to know how much I’m actually giving up.

Tests

• HD Video Playback, 2x HD Video Playback, 3x HD Video Playback, 4x HD Video Playback

These benchmarks examine the behavior of the NAS unit while (simultaneously) playing one or more HD video files at 720p using Windows Media Player. Intel gives a percentage rate for the sequential reading of data in these tests, which lies at 99.5% for the HD Video Playback Test. With 2x HD Video Playback, it lies at 18.1%. The result is 6.6% with 3x HD Video Playback and 9.6 % with 4x HD Video Playback.

• HD Video Record

This test writes an HD Video file in 720p format to the NAS unit. This test is made of up of mostly sequentially transferred data.

• HD Video Playback & Recording

HD Video Play & Record examines the behavior of the NAS unit when simultaneously reading and writing an HD Video file in the 720p format. The sequentially-transferred data in this test is approximately 18% of the test.

• HD 2x Playback 2x Record

This benchmark is similar to the one above, but the proportion of sequential file operations is 3%.

• HD Playback With Office

This metric measures the data transfer rates when an HD Video file is read from the NAS unit while working with the Office applications. This test is made up of 608 files. The proportion of sequential file operations is 53.2%.

• HD Playback With Backup

Like the previous test, but this time an HD Video file is played while simultaneously carrying out a backup on the NAS unit.

• Content Creation

This benchmark is made up of 95% write operations to the NAS unit. This simulates the creation of files on the NAS unit such as is the case when, for example, using video editing programs.

• File Copy To NAS / File Copy From NAS

These tests determine the data transfer rate when copying files to or from the NAS unit. In both of these test processes, a 4 GB file is copied. Unlike with Backup / Restore, 64 KB is read and written.

• Directory Copy From NAS / Directory Copy To NAS

Similar to the previous test, files are copied to and from the NAS unit. A total of 126 files with a total size of approximately 188 MB are written and read across the network.

• Photo Album

This test determines how the NAS unit handles the supply of a multitude of small files—for example, viewing digital photographs stored on the NAS unit. It simulates the viewing of a total of 169 photographs with an overall size of approximately 1.2 GB.

Considerations and Assumptions

These tests were conducted on the Server, not over the network, which will probably result in very high throughput.  I did this to get a feel for the actual performance, not that felt over the wire, and because I’m currently running 100 Mbps (Cat 5e) on my LAN, not gigabit.  Thus, I did not want the network to be the bottleneck in these tests, as it would be saturated and skew the results.

I ran the tests 6 times, in each, manipulating the environment to establish a real world benchmark.  Since this benchmark is done via an application, it will compete with other processes for resources.  Additionally, it will compete with the actual Operating System who is responsible for transfering the data to the disk and calculating the parity for the raid (which is quite memory and CPU intensive).  For test 6 I ran the system in Safe Mode, utilizing only necessary processes and services to run the operating system (Safe Mode without Networking).  Thus, the numbers are quite high.  In the others, I ran Outlook, SQL, browsed the internet and downloading files via torrents (to the actual RAID, so this will mess with the numbers as well) – not all at the same time, of course, except for test 4.

Results

Discussion

I attribute the absurd file copy speeds to caching and buffering at both the OS, RAID and the Drive level, as well as the writes for the video recording.  All in all, I’m pleased with the benchmarks and am satisfied with the set up.  One thing to note is that the tests were done from the SYSTEM drive to the RAID, and thus, the SYSTEM drive introduced an additional bottleneck as the transfers from it to the RAID were going to be quite slow (the drive is benchmarked at ~56MB READ and ~30 WRITE).

My Outlook 2007 hung, so I forced it closed and opened it back up. I found that my backup PST was corrupted.  Outlook told me to run ScanPST.exe, but didn’t bother telling me where it was.  According to the KB article, it’s located in the Common Files directory, which I can verify for Outlook 2000/2003/XP.  However, with Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, I found it here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

Hopefully that’ll save you some time searching and get to the bigger issue at hand…

A document on the Microsoft Office Online site provides detailed instructions on how to export your Contacts from Outlook.

Here’s the scoop:

1. In Outlook, on the File menu, click Import and Export.
2. Click Export to a file, and then click Next.
3. Click Comma Separated Values (Windows), and then click Next.
4. In the folder list, click the Contacts folder, and then click Next.
5. Browse to the folder where you want to save the contacts as a .csv file.
6. Type a name for the exported file, and then click OK.
7. Click Next.
8. Click Finish.

That gives you a comma separate list of your Outlook Contacts. Transfer that to your new computer, then you can import them into your new version of Outlook with the following steps:

1. On the File menu, click Import and Export.
2. Click Import from another program or file, and then click Next.
3. In the list, click Comma Separated Values (Windows), and then click Next.
4. Click Browse, locate your file, and then click Next.
5. Click your Contacts folder or another folder that contains contacts, and then click Next.
6. In the list, click the file that contains your address list, and then click Map Custom Fields.

That should get you going. If you need more help here are two reference pages from Microsoft, one on Exporting Outlook Contacts and another on Importing Outlook Contacts.

This code does not actually delete the contacts, just flags them as duplicates using the FTPSite field. If some of your contacts use the FTPSite field, you might want to change it.  I also added contacts with no names, just for safe keeping.

Public Sub deleteduplicatecontacts()
Dim oldcontact As ContactItem, newcontact As ContactItem, j As Integer
Set mynamespace = GetNamespace(“MAPI”)
Set myfolder = mynamespace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderContacts)
Set myitems = myfolder.Items
myitems.Sort “[File As]“, olDescending
totalcount = myitems.Count
j = 1
While ((j < totalcount) And (myitems(j).Class <> olContact))
j = j + 1
Wend
Set oldcontact = myitems(j)
For i = j + 1 To totalcount
If (myitems(i).Class = olContact) Then
Set newcontact = myitems(i)
‘if((newcontact.lastmodificationtime = oldcontact.lastmodificationtime) and
If ((newcontact.LastNameAndFirstName = oldcontact.LastNameAndFirstName) And _
(newcontact.FileAs = oldcontact.FileAs) And _
(newcontact.PagerNumber = oldcontact.PagerNumber) And _
(newcontact.HomeTelephoneNumber = oldcontact.HomeTelephoneNumber) And _
(newcontact.BusinessTelephoneNumber = oldcontact.BusinessTelephoneNumber) And _
(newcontact.BusinessAddress = oldcontact.BusinessAddress) And _
(newcontact.Email1Address = oldcontact.Email1Address) And _
(newcontact.HomeAddress = oldcontact.HomeAddress) And _
(newcontact.CompanyName = oldcontact.CompanyName)) Or newcontact.LastNameAndFirstName = “” Then
‘use FTPSite as a flag to mark duplicates
newcontact.FTPSite = “DELETEmeIamAdupe!”
newcontact.Save
End If
Set oldcontact = newcontact

Because of a protocol error, this session will be disconnected.

For some months now, I’ve not been able to use Microsoft Terminal Server to connect from my laptop to my work desktop. Oh, I could connect just fine, but then immediately (or very shortly) after logging in I’d be disconnected with the unhelpful error, “Because of a protocol error, this session will be disconnected. Please try connecting to the remote computer again.” What does that mean, and what do I do if the error happens again when I try to reconnect as it says? off to search for an answer. Nothing useful there, and Microsoft’s help for this message is complete useless. “Try connecting to the remote computer again. If you receive the same message, contact the server administrator.” Reconnecting caused the same problem, and I’m the administrator. I tried contacting myself, but I couldn’t get through. Now what?

I had already ruled out bad patches, bad software installations, and even went through a series of troubleshooting steps to “reset” terminal server. Out of the blue today, I got the idea that maybe the visual style I was using could cause this problem, as it might be a drawing issue that TS can’t handle. I was using the “sgnome” style (don’t remember where I got it but I think it was from deviantART originally), so I swapped back to the default Luna style and tried a TS connection.

It worked! Okay, verify it. Previously, the act of opening an email in Outlook could cause the error, so I tried that. It still works. Tried replying to an email, still worked. Now my TS sessions are rock solid, I’m not getting kicked with a “protocol error”, and all I did was change my style back to Luna. WTF? Well, I can’t live with Luna as it’s too boring, so I went searching for a different style. I settled on Reluna, after verifying that it didn’t break anything else.

Why did I think of visual styles? In the past I’ve had bad styles that broke other things. Most notably, I’ve had some styles that caused really bad rendering problems when opening a scheduled meeting request from Outlook. If a style can screw that up, it certainly can screw up Terminal Server. The moral of the story is to be careful when using user-created visual styles. They’re not certified by Microsoft in any way (in fact, you will generally have to hack uxtheme.dll or pay for something like StyleXP (which is what I use) to use non-Microsoft styles at all), and can do some nasty stuff. If you do run into random problems that you’ve never experienced with a previous style, switch back to Classic or Luna as part of your troubleshooting steps, and see if that solves it.

stPassword v1.02 – Outlook PST Password Recovery
Copyright (c) 2006 – 2007 Nir Sofer

Password Encryption in PST File

The password encryption in the PST file is very weak, and for each password-protected PST file, there are many passwords that can open it.
PstPassword provides 3 different passwords for each password-protected PST file. It’s possible that one of them will be the origianl password that you typed, and it’s also possible that none of these passwords will be identical to the original one. However, all 3 passwords provided by PstPassword will open the PST file without problems.
For more interesting facts about the PST password encryption, click here.

Using PstPassword

PstPassword doesn’t require any installation process or additional dll files. In order to start using it, just run the executable file, PstPassword.exe
After you run PstPassword, the main window displays the list of all PST files of the current logged on user (Under Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook). For each password-protected PST file, PstPassword provide 3 alternative passwords that will open the PST file. If the PST is not protected by a password, the 3 password columns remain empty, and the CRC value column is 0×00000000.
If you want to recover a password of PST file that doesn’t appear in the default list, you can press F7 and select the desired PST file, or simply drag the PST file from Explorer window into the main window of PstPassword.
If from some reason PstPassword fails to read a PST file, an error message is displayed under the error column, and the item is painted with pink color.

Nir’s Website: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/pst_password.html

A big thank you goes out to Nir!