Replies

You could also set up a TweakUI Search Prefix with your “autotext”. The *post, Super Search Tip! Windows XP (all) with TweakUI, shows how. The “Use Google to search the KB” example looks like a direct fit to your needs.

In addition to most of the standard searches shown, I often add search prefixes for document control systems and similar corporate information sources for each of the client sites I’m working at. It can save what feels like hours on the more cumbersome searches.

1. Recommendations from trusted (knowledgeable) friends.

2. Google, with a healthy dose of scepticism, careful judgement, and a dash of luck.

#1 risks a good friendship unless treated with care, while #2 is more work and more objective.

The simplest solution would be to have the originator save the file in 97-2003 format, but presumably that option isn’t available.

Sounds evil!

Lucky I use Avira AntiVir, the fist freebie to cover this nasty, second only to the commercial NOD32.

Fair enough, I guess it would work, especially where staff don’t need to travel.

Most clients I deal with are in resources or infrastructure, so many “office” staff end up spending substantial portions of time on site or off shore (along with their laptops). Similarly, my laptop may accompany me to two or three clients on any one day.

You obviously don’t need to access self-study courses, product presentations, etc, many of which would be next to useless without sound. However, even with these, the expected/polite thing to do is to use headphones.

Speakers are also well nigh impossible to avoid with laptops and newer flat panel displays, although you could always open the casing in snip the speaker wires.

As for policy, most larger sites I’m familiar with have reasonably liberal policies on what you can do with your PC, and what you can access on the web. A few have “blacklisted” the worst distractions, but otherwise it’s pretty much a free for all. Each new employee, consultant, contractor has to read & sign to acknowledge they’ve understood the policy. The policies tend to very brief, along the lines of “do whatever is needed to perform your work, but if you compromise security, performance, (corporate) reputation, or do anything illegal you will be dismissed without notice”. And they follow through! (It only takes a few quick departures for the word to spread that “being a naughty boy/girl” is a bad idea.)

In practise what it means is that as long as you behave yourself, you can catch up on news, check The Lounge, etc during your lunch.

Nice one, Stuart

I do the same for applications that insist on defaulting to their preferred folder for each new save. It may not be eactly elegant, but works wonders and minimises the pain.

As per Al & Doc, deleting a few files here & there during housekeeping is highly unlikely to make a difference. The main benefit from the removal of unnecessary files maybe in folders you access often, to make locating files you want simpler. You’re more likely to gain (almost) noticeable benefit from an occasional disc reorg during your housekeeping.

The weekend is free again! Thanks for the update Hans – that’s more like the reply I would have expected from ZA.

>I refuse to spend time locating a legal version of 2003

You may want to reconsider – legal versions of pre-2007 MSP are rapidly heading to the hen’s teeth category. A client recently took over two weeks before they finally laid their hands on a copy.

>There’s probably a PHD lurking here for some lucky hacker.

Maybe, although the patchy compatibility between different MSP releases is fairly well established. Each newer release can mostly understand any of the earlier ones, and to a lesser degree save backwards compatible files for use in the earlier releases. But the chances of success diminish as the distance between releases grows.

If the plan is simple it may all work OK. Unfortunately real life plans are rarely simple. It seems (and this is where that PHD could be lurking) that the “behind the scenes” functionality mechanisms vary from release tro release. When you attempt to move a plan between releases these variations can affect how (if) the plan works and can cause unexpected differences in behaviour although the only thing that has changed is the version of MSP.

The fact that your MPP exchanges don’t work could be blessing in disguise; at least it saves trying to work out why the same plan behaves differently in two different versions of the supposedly same program.

I agree; not quite the response you want from someone you’ve grown to trust.

I hope it’s just a stop gap, while the real fix is being feverishly worked upon.

If not, I guess the coming weekend is a good time to research & review the alternatives (although I’d rather be doing something more constructive).

> ” You can use all the calculators you want in my class and on tests. If you don’t know when to add, subtract, multiply and divide….you’ll never get the right answer.”

Sage advice – I like it and hope your maths prof won’t be too upset if I steal his little truism. With minor adjustments, it’s apt in many other areas (esp. software!).

> And certainly not any person who wishes to hide from you!

That is, anyone that knows How to Send an Anonymous Email Message via a remailer, such as SendAnonymousMail

This won’t help with your current problem, but, the moral of the story is “check with Woody before you apply MS updates!”.

For your sake, I hope MS issues a fix to their fix quickly

And with TweakUI, you can further control how/when the buttons are grouped. I rarely get to the numbers of application instances you mention, but find the grouping helpful even with just a few instances/windows.