my2cents

Acronis TrueImage is IMO by far the best backup solution. I stopped using Norton Ghost years ago and didn’t regret it a single day.

For quite some time, however, I wasn’t able to have the backup data (usually a hard drive or partition image)  stored on a different computer over the network. TrueImage simply wasn’t able to locate any other computers in the network. I ascribed this to a crappy network setup and didn’t analyze the problem. A few days ago I realized that TrueImage – at least version 9 – has a problem automatically configuring the LAN adapter over DHCP.

The automatically set subnet mask was 255.255.0.0 although my network was using 255.255.255.0. So I switched off manual configuration in TrueImage, adjusted the subnet mask setting and now it works like a charm. A simple flag makes all the difference…To change the settings you need to open the configuration dialog through the options menu and look for LAN/network settings.

At work I recently had to disable the Acrobat plugin in IE in order to have the same environment as the customer who reported a bug in our software that wasn’t reproducible on my system.
Since I didn’t want to *uninstall* but only temporarily *disable* the plugin I started digging in IE’s Internet Options. There I found a few promising Adobe entries in Programs -> Content that I disabled. Unfortunately, neither a browser restart nor logout/login showed any effect.
The solution is to open the Adobe Acrobat Reader separately as an individual application. Then go to Edit -> Options -> Internet (or Preferences -> Internet on a Mac) and uncheck the “Display PDF in browser” flag.

I’m probably the 100 millionth Microsoft Outlook user who ran into the dreaded winmail.dat-issue while switching from POP3 to IMAP. I posted to the microsoft.public.outlook newsgroup for help, but got none.

In the meantime I found a rather straight forward solution to move all my Outlook email from a .pst/.ost file to the IMAP server. You just have to leave the Microsoft world:

1. Install Mozilla Thunderbird
2. Tell it to import the email from your current Outlook installation
3. Create a new IMAP account in Thunderbird
4. Move all the imported email to the IMAP server with Thunderbird
5. In case you still want to switch back to Outlook – chances are that you won’t, since Outlook is a real bitch when it comes to IMAP support:
   1. Uninstall Thunderbird
   2. Create a new IMAP account in Outlook
   3. Delete your old POP3 account