Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Nigel Garrett could not archive some of his old e-mails on outlook 2003 for some reason. When he decided to archive all the emails before a particular date like 28/05/06 it meant all the emails before that date should have gone into a archive folder onto a network drive specified by him. There were a couple of odd emails which did not seem to getting archived and remained in his inbox.
I went through all his standard settings in first place and when nothing seemed to be working patched his ofiice professional 2003. the problem still did not resolve. Then on refering to some articles over microsoft technet I manged to find the way archive worked in outloook 2003. it explained that archiving doesn't only take into consideration the date email was sent ( that is what all of us see on last column of the outlook) but also the modified date (open the email and check under properties). On looking at the emails which were not getting archived on Nigel's machine the modification dates were different from the sent dates.
The only way to arcvive these emails was to drag and drop them.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Got to install VPN for Barney. As soon as The client software was installed the System showed a blue screen and shut down. I shut down the system and reboot it in the safe mode and then pick the last best configuration. This let me get the system back to position without VPN installed on it. On refering with Alan I was supposed to try installing the VPN in safe mode using networking. The system tends to use the minimum drivers required in the the safe mode. Installed and logged back in as the administrator. The problem still persisted. The last option was to back up the hard drive and format it. Now installed the VPN first of all and configured the rest of the machine. IT WORKED.
Heather logged a call that her desktop toolbar disapeared all of a sudden. On having a look for "toolbar disapeared in windows XP" in google I managed to find that the registery has been corrupted by some kind of malware or adware. Using tweaks I had to edit the registery of the operating system and rectify the problem.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

I was supposed to change the CD ROM with a DVD Combo on Dell Dimension 4100. It was not that staright away as I thought it to be. After opening the chasis of the machine I could not manage to get the ROM out until I reffered to manual available online under technical support.
Even after that it was real pain in the neck replacing that but somehow I managed and afterwards tested if it was working alright.
Barney had asked for access to a new Konica Minolta Bizhub C250 printer and also the one locally attached to Heather's desktop.
I had to get the configuration of the printer first and find out the IP address. After running the add printer wizard and configuring it using the drivers which came on the cd along with the printer it did not print the test page and showed an error: printer page error 8.5x11''. In first instance I could not figure out the problem since I never came across such a thing. On refering some online forums and manuals I could figure out that probabaly the printer was by default set to American standards and needed to be changed accordingly. After right clicking on the icon for the printer and selecting the page preferences I managed to make A4 the default page setting which resolved the problem.
Now I was supposed to configure laptop for printer attached to Heather's desktop. This time as well after going through whole of the wizard nothing seemed to be working and I had to again do a bit of reading. I found from articles that it would not work until the machine which the printer is attached to is sharing the printer and will only allow to print when the local machine is in ON state. I found that the machine was shut down which explains the reasons.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Gerry called that he could not map a network drive to his virtual PC. On going listening to him and following the errors I had to join his virtual machine to workplace domain which now allowed him to map the required drives.
Later he could not install any software to his virtual PC. On going through few articles I managed to find out that he needs to log in as an administrator before trying to install any piece of software. On doing so he was able to install oracle.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Ulrik could not manage to work offline on his outlook 2003. As a company standard we always configure it to allow users to work offline from home or locations where they can not find internet conncetion. I logged into his machine and initially worked online on outlook. Under toools>E-mail Accounts>select View or change existing email accounts>change>more settings>tick use cached exchange mode. Then closed the browser window opened it again and this time selected work offline. It did not show any error message and worked fine.

Alan provided me with the URL and ID password for our Cisco Virtual Private Network and trained me on how to configure it.I looged into the machine and did it individually afterwards and familiarised with it.

Gerry needed a Virtual PC 2004 installed on his HP desktop with Windows XP SP2 on it. I took the MSDN disk along and put it into his CD drive. It did not seem to pick up the CD. I noticed that MSDN disk was a DVD and Gerry desktop only had a CD R\W. I had to put the DVD into my machine and share it with Gerry. I installed the Virtual PC successfully. Now I had to put Windows XP as Virtual Machine. The problem being that I only had the MSDN disk for XP I had to again pull across network from my machine. Unfortunately that did not seem to work this time around since what happens is that when we run Virtual PC console it asks for the boot disk not allowing to select any network source. So I had no other option than to create a windows XP cd.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Yesterday till evening I could not manage to add Quinn as administrator of his laptop probably because the active directory sysnchronises with the domain controller overnight. I managed to sort that out in the morning.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

It was a busy day as expected since I have been on a holiday. I had a new starter Mr. Quinn who required a new laptop so started the day with configuring a laptop for him. Ian Baxter wanted me to put the internet kiosk in place at reception. He had been facing password problem with his laptop as well. Everytime he launched his outlook 2003 it would prompt him for changing his password and even if he changes it nothing seems to be working out. I logged into his machine as an administrator of the local account and changed his password. Then asked him to log in and check if he was still facing that problem. Everything seemed alright to him and he was satisfied.
James Hollywood one of the software support guy logged a call that text in his outlook inbox would sometimes appear very big and makes it difficult for him to work. After asking him a couple of question he did not seem to be catching up well and I eventually had to log remotely onto his machine. I found that he had three different versions of outlook. All he needed was one good configuration of outlook onto his hard drive. I popped in a Microsoft Office 2003 CD into my drive and shared with him. Then using VNC installed office onto his machine from my drive.

Barney Quinn's laptop had one keyboard key missing so ended up replacing his keyboard aswell.