I’m not sure if my tech notes are of any help to anyone or not, but the real reason I blog about the strange things that I experience is because once I’ve found a solution to a problem that I couldn’t find by scouring the Internet, I’ll put it here for reference and also in the hopes that someone could benefit from my frustrations. Apparently my notes are of interest to some people because my site logs show that there’s a lot of people searching for resolutions for Outlook, offline files, and thumbs.db.I hope my notes help and if they don’t at least you stopped by and for that I’m thankful. I’ll continue posting (hopefully more often) with those problems that keep an IT person up at night!

For the last several months I’ve been having an issue with DNS (Domain Name Services) that I just couldn’t figure out! It seemed like at least once a week a user would call up and say “we can’t print to the Sales printer.” And every time, after some quick troubleshooting, it would be determined that the DNS entry for the printer would be lost! It was getting to the point that as soon as someone would call with a problem with that printer, I would immediately check DNS and re-add it because it would disappear! More...

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 Beta today and I have to say I'm very impressed! I've been using the Platform Demos since they were released and have enjoyed watching each little step Microsoft has made to improve their browser. If you're using Windows 7 and don't like IE8, download the beta and give it a try then come back here and tell me what you think. If you're not impressed then you don't have an open mind!

Sometimes you just have too many conflicts when synchronizing your offline files in Windows 7 that you have to start over, but gone are the days of CTRL+SHIFT and clicking the Delete Files button in “Folder Options” like you did back in Windows XP to clear out the CSC (Client Side Cache) folder. Well, here’s how I’ve discovered how to clear the cache and start over. More...

If you’re like me you get annoyed at those little thumbs.db files that Windows has been leaving around every time you use Windows Explorer to view a folder. It really became frustrating when I was working on a project that parsed the contents of a directory to an XML file (more on that project later I hope!) and I kept seeing thumbs.db in my list! So I thought “there’s got to be a way to get rid of these things” and with a little bit of Googling I was able to use a couple of techniques to make it all go away.  More...