Solution: Outlook Changing the sort order changes the currently selected item

Here's the problem: suppose your inbox is sorted by "Received." You select and email and then want to sort by "Subject." Normally, doing so, sorts everything and groups it by subject and the item you had originally selected is still selected. Sometimes you may find that this behavior is no longer the case. Instead, after sorting by "Subject" Outlook selects the first item in the list.

Solution:

1. Click on View->Current View->Customize Current View
2. Click on Group By
3. In the lower right hand corner of the Group by window, you may note that "Expand/collapse defaults:" is set to "As last viewed." If this is the case, change it to "All Expanded"
4. Click OK and OK
5. You're finished.

Blackberry: How to delete the address book or calendar database from your handheld without using Desktop Manager and without wiping your entire device

If you want to resync your address book or calendar with data from the server without wiping your entire device (that is, you want to resync just the address book/contacts or just your calendar):

1. On the Blackberry handheld, open your address book or calendar (whichever you're doing this procedure for)
2. Press the menu button or click on the track wheel
3. Choose Options
4. Once in options, don't go into any submenus; just type rset. You will be prompted "This will erase your [Desktop] contact list, and reload it from your server. Continue?"
5. Select Yes
6. Go back to your address book or calendar and you'll notice that it's initially empty
7. Over the next few minutes you'll note that entries will start to trickle in
8. You're done.

Screen Caps of Microsoft Office Web Apps on iPhone/iPod Touch Mobile Safari

In case you're curious, here is what the Excel Web App looks like on an iPod Touch. Note: when rendered in mobile Safari, you do not have the option to view/edit the file in Skydrive, but if you click on its icon, it opens the file as follows:

Unlike on the various desktop browsers (including Safari), there is no ribbon--no UI at all really, except for the contents of the worksheet.

Here is a Word doc in Safari 4.0.3 on Windows:

Here is the same document on the iPod in landscape

Here is the same document on the iPod in portrait:

I also thought I'd test one of my favorite new features of Office 2010: Sparklines! Here's an Excel worksheet with sparklines rendered in Safari 4.0.3 on Windows (note: the Excel Web App does indeed support both sparklines and conditional formatting):

And here's a screen cap of the same worksheet on Mobile Safari (sadly, no Sparklines and no Conditional Formatting/Heat map):

Completely unrelated, but while we're on the subject of conditional formatting and sparklines, the Excel Web App does supports editing these as well. That is, on the above worksheet, if you change the value in cell A1 to 50, A1 will turn green and the sparkline in F1 will redraw with a peak at the beginning like so:

Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps Technical Preview: Excel File Size Limit

Interesting observation: the Excel Web App has a file size limit. I don't know the parameters (it may just be the number of rows or the physical file size itself, but when trying to open a 19.9MB file to view or edit, it received the following error (which is something of a bummer, since with server-side rendering, the Excel Web App could be a great tool for very large datasets):

Norton Technical Support Phone Number: (800) 695-0678. Norton Customer Service Phone Number: (800) 695-0678

Norton Technical Support Phone Number: (800) 695-0678. Norton Customer Service Phone Number: (800) 695-0678

Lenovo ThinkPad S Drive and Q Drive (aka How to remove or hide the S Drive and Q Drive on a Lenovo ThinkPad X200, X200s, X300, X301, T400, T500, etc.)

If you purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad lately, you will have noticed that there are now Q and S drives for the recovery and boot partitions. Historically these were hidden. Now they're probably conflicting with your network drives. You can remove the Q drive (it's just the recovery media and you'll automatically reclaim the partitioned space on your C drive) but without lots of work , you cannot remove the S drive. (By lots of work you could use bcdedit to install the bootloader on the C: drive and then edit the MBR to make it bootable, or you can roll the dice, delete the S drive and use a Vista CD to "repair" the OS--this should work but not guaranteed).

Solution(s)
To Remove the Q Drive:
Just use the built-in recovery media creator program to remove it and reclaim your unused space.

To "Remove" the S Drive:

Don't. Instead follow the directions in the following article: How to work with the Q and S partitions on ThinkPads - ThinkPad X200, X200 Tablet, X301, R400, R500, SL300, SL400, SL500, T400, T500, W500, W700. (http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-71742)

If you're unfamiliar with using diskpart.exe here's a step-by-step:

1. Download and run Lenovo_Hide_Drive_S.exe available at the link above.  You can launch the program by double-clicking it.  It has no UI, but if you wait long enough (1-3 minutes) when you open My Computer, you will notice that the S drive is missing.
2. Open an Administrative command prompt (click on the Start button, enter cmd, right-click cmd and choose Run As Administrator, answer any UAC prompt, and continue).
3. Enter dispart.exe and press enter.
4. Type select disk 0 and press enter (this sets the program's context to disk 0 which should be primary physical drive where the C and S drives live.  If you'd like to be certain, you can enter list disk to display which disk is the correct one).
5. Type select partition 1 and press enter (on a factory install it should be partition 1, as above, you can enter list partition to find the right one).
6. Type set id=7 and press enter (always do this).
7. Type assign letter=D and press enter (set the drive letter to whatever you like).
8. Type exit and press enter
9. Open my computer and look and check out the results.

That's it!

Battery life on the Dell E4200 and E4300 Laptops including battery slices

E4200

• 4-cell 3.7hrs 0.2 kg (0.44 lbs)
• 6-cell 7.3hrs 0.37?0.38 kg (0.82?0.84 lb)
• slice 14.8hrs 0.59?0.61 kg (1.3?1.34 lb)

E4300

• 3-cell 4.5hrs 0.191 kg (0.4211 lb)
• 6-cell 7.3hrs 0.3366 kg (0.7421 lb)
• Slice 13.3hrs 0.59?0.61 kg (1.3?1.34 lb)

How to troubleshoot corrupted virus definitions for Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition (SAV)

This is really a post for myself as a reminder--I find that every year or so a server out there downloads corrupted definitions and starts kerfuffling an entire network....

Some symptoms:

• rtvscan.exe 99% cpu or high cpu utilization
• the rtvscan.exe process won't start with the error 7203 - Environment Incorrect

Some fixes

• How to determine if virus definitions used by Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition are corrupted
• Error: "0010, The environment is incorrect" or "Could not start the Symantec AntiVirus service on [server name]. The environment is incorrect."
• How to manually repair or backdate virus definitions

That's all for now.