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2 things could be causing these issues, firstly, if you ‘trust’ the email sender or domain, the images normally appear fine – only recommended for emails you get regular and trust the sender. Secondly, if IE is installed, you will need to empty the temporary file cache every now and then to allow emails to pull down images — to do with Outlook 2007/2010’s HTML renderer being IE and not Word as in previous editions of Outlook.

I found that if i changed the temp file size on the browser to 512MB, this issue rarely happened to my users. since moving to IE8 corp build a few months ago and doing some tweaks, this issue is pretty much gone.

i was about to ask about the PSU wattage, as having 4 sata drives, optical drives and a 480 GFX card, i thought of power issues, but with a 1200W supply, i would hope not, although the 480 at full ability will almost eat half of that.

if your board was not in warranty, i would suggest fitting a PCIe SATA controller card and offload the backup drives onto that.

you might want to check with your board, system or NIC manufacturer, and see if there is an updated Win 7 driver, some earlier or built-in drivers had an issue with power management controls, mainly Realtek & Broadcom chipsets.

some Win 7 users (myself included) find that in an office LAN environment, its actually better to disable IPv6 on the NIC. your network connection is more responsive when communicating with servers. disabling Win 7 autotune is also a common occurrence for better speeds, especially copying files.

just to add to the tips, as well as ‘careful’ use of CCleaner, remember to look at some of the other Piriform free apps such as Recuva (file recovery), Defraggler (disk defrag) and the recent Speccy, for monitoring/listing system specs and temperatures (if your hardware supports it). I find these tools handy, especially when working on a lot of ‘home’ IT fixes/jobs. I use the FILEHIPPO website (http://www.filehippo.com/) which has all this software, and also an Updater/Checker program, which scans and helps you update out of date apps, from Flash to Firefox to Quicktime or Java, its scans a lot of programs and then gives you a summary in a browser of your choice, to link and download from FH’s website – quickly.

Once you have cleaned up your XP system and before you image it, defrag the drive and optimise it (also with CCleaner’s reg checker/cleaner to sort the registry).

Treesize Free edition is also a good application (i use the Pro version in our IT dept.), this scans your system, and shows you the files and folders you have, their size and location. Also handy for spotting duplicates, you can see where all your disk space is and how it’s used – http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

Iain.

I have used UltraVNC for years. In addition to normal VNC client-server functions, it also has a very small self-contained server that you can send to clients. When they run it, it connects back to your client only (assuming you have a static IP) and, as a result, it can traverse routers with NAT enabled. Free, too. http://www.uvnc.com/

i too use this a lot within our company, and the in-built file transfer capability has saved me time/effort on several occasions. Just need to figure out why 2008 Server R2 doesn’t like the CTRL+ALT+DEL command request, so far have to resort to RDP for 2008 R2 servers.

Gerald is right about the Page-file allocation sizes, its always been 1.5 x Ram as minimum and 3 x RAM as maximum, some XP systems will not you set past 4095, but most of my recent system builds of XP Pro SP3 in the last few years, happily lets you go beyond this. The page-file needs to have this extra room, so when your using all or most of the RAM running many apps or a game-server, it still has resources to keep going, even though the RAM is nearly depleted.

This will involve a lot of swaps to disk, as the system tries to keep the current data and high priority processes running, at the expense of dumping the older info to disk.

You need to be running the task manager and sort the processes list by name, go to View and Select Columns and add in PID, GDI Objects and perhaps the I/O Read & Write bytes, so you can track what is causing the high usage of your machine, and causing the crashes. DO you have any event logs under Application or System to show what errors are being generated? DO you have AV running on the game machine, can you access the internet, is the system fully patched, and has it been defragged?

Don’t forget to check the Master/Slave jumpers on the back of the CD & DVD players.

good thing to check, but remember only applies to IDE/ATA devices, not SATA.

might be worth taking the unit out of the PC, and seeing if you can get the housing off, normally a few screws, and pop the bezel off with a flat-blade and then get some compress air and give it a good blow out – assemble and then use a CD-Cleaner disc to make sure the lens is clear/clean. Or as you say, invest in a newer drive, with better speeds, Lightscribe etc. Just remember to check whether you need to hunt down another IDE drive, or if you can invest in a SATA unit if your board has the connectors.

your welcome……

the time this has saved me over the last 7-8 or so years of working with XP, is unmeasurable. trying to make sure the same can be done in Win 7 now.

Byron, what he said was had the hardware to make the change, but not to have both connected at the same time, and the fact that he is using an ATA (PATA) drive and SATA drive, i took a guess that it was perhaps an older machine, there is no guarantee that the motherboard has both connectors (he did say a NON-SATA system).

Having an adapter is fine for short term link up for cloning ( i use a 44pin adapter myself in our test bench desktop when we clone laptop drives), but long term use I wouldn’t want to be using adapters (and run in ATA mode), you want to be able to use the full ability of a SATA-II drive on a SATA-II controller (almost twice the performance), hence the controller PCI card suggestion.

you can also use the free version of Clonezilla, and make a boot-able CD, best to try and have both drives connected internally, so the boards I/O handles the data transfer, rather than having to go out via the USB controller. If the computer is a non-SATA system, then there is little point in cloning the drive unless you fit a SATA controller. You will also need to adjust the bios to make sure it sees and boots to the new SATA device and not stall looking for an IDE device.

fastest way would be to export the contacts to a new PST file and then pass the file over to the other person to mount into their Outlook client. i don’t think making them a delegate for your contacts will work, as they will only see the main contact folder, and not any sub-folders you may make.

prior to Outlook 2003 SP2 or 3, the hard limit for PST files was 2GB, if you went over it (which you can do briefly) it would cost you some messages and involve a lengthy repair process to get back the PST file. On later versions of Outlook, you can go higher than 2GB, but i still advise my users to keep them under 2GB, and frequently burn them to DVD as backup incase of system/drive failure or loss of laptop if travelling.

By default your PST files are stored in c:Dos & SettingsLocal SettingsApps DataMSOutlook

i would enable auto-archive (Tools, Option, Other) to run every 14 days, and archive (make sure delete is NOT selected) messages older then 3 months, which will move most of the Sent Items messages down to the Archive.PST file on your laptop. Now for your other issue, is this a disk space issue, or RAM used to run the application, Task Manager will be able to show you (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) how much resources it uses in memory, look under processes, click the Image Name column to sort in to A-Z, and then look for Outlook.exe and drop the last 3 digits to get the MB of memory in use. Go tot he file path listed above if you wish to see the size of your PST files. You can create more to file your emails more efficiently, and this is done via the ToolsOptionsMail Setup tab and Data Files button mid-right of the window.

There is no getting away from it, if you have a lot of mail, even after you try and compress the PST’s, you will still need a fair amount of disk space to store them. You will also need the XP Search 4.0 upgrade patch (KB940157) to be able to search for emails in Outlook 2007 properly.

could be a permissions issue, if its not a corporate handset, and your not using a BES server to auto-manage these updates. How are you copying your calendar down to your personal laptop (PST export?). Normally you need to break the wireless default setup for contacts/calendar synch and set it to manual only, so you can use the DM program to run the synch. Mailbox should always be the winner, so the data stays on the Outlook client and a copy is put on the handset.

also make sure you have the latest DM installed, v5.01 is currently available, and also helps if you handset firmware is up to date.

i would recommend the upgrade, and get used to the new interface now, plenty of online help and training available, i can even send you some PPTX files used when we migrated all our users and gave them a mini-training course on the differences/changes to minimise the impact on my very small 2 man department. As JoeP already pointed out, security fixed will continue until April 2014, but nothing else will get changed/fixed, and you have no support with MS unless you pay for it.

Office 2010 will also see ribbon bar’s added to Outlook, Visio and Project for the first time. Once you know how to customise the bar, and use the quick launch links right at the top of the screen to do repetitive and frequent tasks, you do eventually improve your productivity, along with saving files in the new X format – DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, which makes office file much much smaller – saving on huge amounts of disk space in a company environment or home network if you have a lot of files or work from home. Don’t forget to download the free add-on to Office 2007 which adds PDF capability, due to some legal wrangling, it could not be added by default, but nothing stopping you acquiring the 933KB file and installing it yourself. Its ok, but not as small a file as you get from CutePDF. You can also make sure of the Prepare option to send the file direct as an attachment or email from inside the app.