The Outlook options structure is pretty arcane with all its n-levels of nesting. It’s pretty hard to find the option you want. So you had a envelope that shows you have unread mails before and it’s not there anymore. Bring it back with:

Tools -> Options -> Preferences -> E-mail Options -> Advanced E-mail Options -> Show an envelope icon in the notification area

Symptom: You choose to run a workflow but nothing seems to happen and the new workflow doesn’t appear in the workflow tab.

Theory: If my CRM exam studyage served me right, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM is composed of 3 parts. The application layer producing the business logic, the data layer interfacing with SQL and the async service layer doing stuff like workflows on the background (a bit like SQL agent). If the first 2 break, you won’t get your CRM site at all. When the async service layer breaks, it’s a bit more subtle like in this case.

Diagnosis: The most important part is to intercept at least some form of error output and determine what’s wrong with the system. You need to turn on your tracing function for CRM as described here. The look at your web log and your async log, typically at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\Trace.

Possible Causes:

• First, be sure to update your CRM software. At the time of the writing, the Update Rollup 11 is the newest
• Check your IIS web.config file. Make sure critical parts required for the async service are there. Make sure for instance that the <System.Workflow.ComponentModel.WorkflowCompiler> section is there to allow the workflow compiler to use basic CLI classes like String and Object etc.
• If your CRM site is initially installed in port 5555, changing it after in IIS Manager won’t affect the async service. Therefore, if you change it to port 80 or do anything else to change the URL for accessing your CRM site, you won’t be able to access the async service. Check your trace to confirm your initial setting.

By default, when you connect to VPN in Windows, it will put all your Internet traffic through the VPN. This can be annoying if you just want to VPN in to get access to some files on the network. This can be especially annoying if your VPN server is slow and now all your Internet access speed is slow.

To use VPN for domain network access only

1. Right-click your VPN connection and choose properties.
2. Go to Networking tab and open your TCP/IPv4 item
3. Click on Advanced…
4. Uncheck “Use default gateway on remote network” and click OK

Now, only relevant traffic goes through VPN

I was used to the convenience of drop-down terminals like Visor in Mac or Yakuake in Linux and needed something similar in Windows.

It turns out, it is possible to achieve almost the same effects in Windows with the use of 2 tools.

• AutoHotkey -  lets you run scripts triggered by hotkeys anywhere in Windows
• Console – is a terminal app that lets you run a custom shell with no title bar, no borders, transparency etc.

Follow these steps to get it working:

1. Download Console and put it somewhere (ie. C:\Program Files\Console2\)
2. Make sure it’s in your %path% system environment (Right-click My Computer, Properties, Advanced system settings, Advanced, Environment Variables)
3. Run it, go to Edit -> Settings. Change the settings to suit your taste
   • Change your shell to PowerShell at C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe for Windows 7 and change your startup dir
   • Change the window size columns to take up most of your screen
   • Windows fonts suck, try Andale Mono or Monaco
   • Make sure initial position is at 0, 0 and always on top
   • Under Appearance -> More…, make sure it has no menu, no toolbar, no caption, not resizable, no border, no taskbar, no tray icon for minimal footprint
   • Set your transparency
4. Download AutoHotkey and install it
5. Download this script to your Startup foler, change the hotkey to what you want to use in the script. It is initially Ctrl-`
6. Run the script and press your hotkey
7. Boom, you got a terminal at your fingertip

Sources: [1] [2]

The error “The location of the file or directory ‘C:\Something’ is not trusted” can sometimes be issued when linking or deploying assemblies in Windows. The issue is that Vista and Windows 7 have a way of automatically marking files received from another computer as unsafe to execute against.

The easiest way to solve is to remove the restriction against the particular file

Right-click the file and open properties and click unblock.

Spooler simply stops every time you try to print or add a printer or something? You can keep restarting it but will never be able to print something? I won’t pretend to know your problem since it depends on potentially so many things but if you have a MacBook, one thing worth investigating is have you been running VMWare Fusion? The ThinPrint drivers of the VMWare Tools seem to be able to cause this problem when you run the same machine in BootCamp mode. Unfortunately, you can’t just uninstall it. Uninstalling VMWare Tools from inside virtual mode seems to solve this problem

Just got Snow Leopard and installed Boot Camp 3.0 on Windows? Boot Camp 3.0 is definitely a well welcomed update. The trackpad works much better now with 2 finger tap for secondary click, it finally works like in OS X. Even better, you can now access HFS+ without third party apps in Windows. Definitely nice for Windows 7 x64 users that MacDrive doesn’t even support. But one problem that seems to trouble people in the forums is that navigating to /Users/[yourname] in Windows shows an empty folder. You can’t access your music or pictures or anything from Windows.

One possibility is the presence of a .Xauthority file in your $HOME directory. Delete the file and you may access your home directory in Windows. Remember that running X11 will recreate the file. Delete it again.

To automate the whole process, consider creating a script that lets you boot into Windows worry free.

tell application "Finder"
	if exists file "~/.Xauthority" then
		delete file "~/.Xauthority"
	end if
end tell
do shell script "bless -mount /Volumes/[your Windows device]/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

Put this in AppleScript editor and save it as a .app to make it executable. You can manpage the bless command for more options. You can also change the icon like any other app. At that point, you can invoke this via QuickSilver and a GUI dialog will prompt you for password.

It’s also possible that there are no .Xauthority files in the subdirectories so simply type in explorer the subdirectories to access them directly. ie: D:/Users/[you]/Desktop