Lisa Hendrickson is the owner of Call That Girl. She is an Outlook Expert and Microsoft 365 Consultant.
Many of our clients use Outlook and most of the tips below are things I review with the clients when they call in with problems. Not every tip pertains to everyone, but overall these are great tips for Outlook users.
TIP: Outlook by default opens a PST File (Personal Storage) in a hidden file on your computer. That is where most of your email and folders probably are. Not everyone knows this and it’s very important that you back up that PST file often. If your computer crashes, the PST is just as important as your pictures and music!
TIP: if your Outlook is getting slow to open, you may want to see how large your PST file is. Some versions of Outlook will lock you out if it gets too large. If you have a newer copy of Outlook, you have a lot more room. But keep this in mind, the larger your PST file, the longer it will take to open. I won’t get into technical talk about this, but if your Outlook is slow to open, call us for a quick review on it, we can help you move off old emails to another PST and get your Outlook in good shape again.
TIP: Using multiple computers and am sick of dealing with mail everywhere? I happen to use a IMAP instead of (Pop3) that synchronizes all of my email and folders. I was at a place a few months ago where I had 4 computers I was checking email on and was just tired of all the extra work I had to do to manage the email. If you are interested in learning more about this, contact us for a review.
TIP: Set up rules and make your life easier! I have been doing this for years and LOVE IT. If I happen to get a ton of email from one person, I give them a folder and a rule. When I get an email from that person, it goes right to the folder I need. Outlook marks it unread, so you know there is new email there.
TIP: Looking for a calendar sync tool? I have been using the Google calendar with my Outlook for a couple of months and have to admit, I really like it. As many of you know, I’m not a big fan of using Google for everything, but I am liking this calendar option. You have to invite yourself to the event, and then it syncs to your Outlook calendar. I have my assistant do all the bookings on the Google calendar and I get the invites on my Blackberry and every computer I have Outlook on. I really dig this!
TIP: Be sure to check your junk e-mail folders! So many of us forget to check that folder, and I have found many important emails sneaking in there! Why is that? Because of the subject line. The person sent it with a title that was caught by spam/junk filters. I think checking that daily is important, you can mark what is not spam/junk to make sure that those emails come to your regular inbox.
Ah, finally…it’s time for the Doctor to tell her patients what they are doing wrong with their computers. One thing I will tell you for sure not to do is, floss at night! But there are many things we find our clients doing that are just flat out bad, wrong and ugly. Your computer will thank you if you listen to this advice.
1.) Never restarting. Many of you keep your computers on all day and night. Give it a restart on occasion! It’s good for the computer to refresh itself.
2.) Never do your updates. I can’t tell you how many computers we look at each week that never get basic updates. These include Adobe, Java, Flash, Windows and your anti-virus.
3.) Shutting off with the power button. You should always try to shut down your computer the proper way by going to your start button and selecting “‘shut down”. This allows the operating system to shut down as it was intended. By just pushing the power button, you are forcing a shut off and sometimes the computer’s operating system will be corrupted after doing that. You may see some repair windows come up the next time you turn it on.
4.) Not buying enough memory for your computer. If you have had a tune up done by us, we conduct a 22 pt checklist and part of that checklist includes checking your memory. It’s important to have enough to make your computer time fun and fast! No one wants a sluggish computer experience. We can help you with memory; to set up an appt, give us a call!
5.) Overspending on a computer. Many of our clients have told us that they paid over $1000 for a family home computer. I’m going to guess that was years ago, because now you can get a decent home tower/desktop computer for well under $500. Before you go shopping, call us and get a consultation done and we will help you purchase what you and your family needs, save you money and save you shopping headaches! Many times we can help you buy it online, get shipped to your home and we can come help set it up!
Many of our clients at Call That Girl call in with problems and sometimes they tell us that their computer doesn’t come out of sleep or hibernate very well. I have learned from the old XP days that not all computers are comfy in sleep mode. The computers may be sluggish and don’t want to spring back to life so fast, or they are just aging overall. When Vista came out, I called it the “Vista Coma”, and alerted all of those clients to just not use sleep mode as it usually caused them problems. Windows 7 is not so problematic though, I’m guessing because the computers are selling with higher amounts of hardware memory to allow the sleep and hibernate functions to work as they should.
Let’s do a quick review now of Hibernation vs. Sleep Mode in non-techie terms
Hibernation mode:
Sleep mode:
In a nutshell, as you read in the quick review here, sleep mode is the best to use for laptops. Hibernate is more like a shut down mode.
For those having problems, here is a quick guide:
This morning I had an 8:30 a.m. appt with a client and in a rush, I opted to not go to the office and just hit a local Caribou that was close to my friend’s house. I get in the Caribou and frantically look for an outlet close to the tables. I couldn’t find any! All of the outlets I could find where already being used or a family was sitting near it. I was close to getting a bit frustrated….I wandered around like a fool wondering how this busy little Caribou in Blaine, MN could only have two outlets for all the customers!
Then…doh. I look by the small tables in a row and see a strip right by the tables, installed so sharply that you can’t really see them up close, but they were installed as part of the window frame lol. I thought I had read years ago that coffee places had installed these power strips to accommodate the computers for the customers, but I guess I don’t go to coffee houses much to do real work.
So my doh turns to YAY. I plunk down and start to figure out all my junk and stuff; do my computer set up. Plug everything in, including my phone (my car charger just died and I was down to no juice!), turn on the computer, let it boot up and go get some java finally. Come back with coffee and find I can’t read my screen. UGH.
Go back to the counter, get some wet napkins, and clean my screen up. Now I cleaned all the crap off of the screen, but the glare is horrible (not getting a glare screen, because I barely ever need one in my day to day life), so I have to deal with the bit of glare. My body turns out to be a nice shadow against the windows, and I can see it enough to work.
My 8:30 appt starts. Then the next drama begins, the espresso machines are so loud that I can’t hear my client! LOL. I did really LOL out loud because I didn’t think of that noise before. Only now that I am on my phone I recognize it. I tell my client to just hold tight when they make espressos because I can’t really do anything about the noise.
While I am now done with my appt, I am still sitting here blogging, trying to enjoy the coffee shop experience. Now I can’t help but laugh…the guy next to me just made a phone call and immediately cupped his open ear so he can hear better, he has no power cord for his computer and has no bags to deal with. I can tell he’s a coffee shop pro.
Goodbye blue screen of death, welcome white screen of death! If you haven’t experienced it yet, consider yourself lucky. (It is annoying.) I get them when I use Outlook 2010 and I have a fast computer, or so I think. My laptop at home that gets the WSOD has 4 gigs of ram. My computer at work has 8 gigs of ram and I get the WSOD occasionally on that computer, too. I do not believe it’s caused by lack of memory. I have tried to troubleshoot this issue for months now and for the most part I have concluded that it’s pushing the bigger programs that are using Windows 7 to their max.
Now, let’s begin with what the WSOD is.
Sometimes while working in the internet or especially in Outlook 2010, or just doing too many things at one time, your computer will start to look cloudy and everything you worked on looks transparent. The application you were working in is totally in a white screen of death mode and frozen up. If you go to the bottom tasks, you can usually continue to work in those, as they aren’t frozen up.
Do not start clicking, clicking and clicking in the white screen of death application. Clicking more only causes the computer to stay frozen or continue to white screen. Your best recourse of action is to just let it ride out. If you don’t need the application and data you were working on (like internet surfing, etc), you can end the task in windows and re-open a new browser window, or do what I do (as I am very impatient!), open a new browser all together, such as Firefox or Chrome. If you do need the data you were working on, the best thing to do is just ride out the storm. Most of the time in Outlook 2010 it will figure itself out and be back to normal in a few minutes. If after five or ten minutes it’s still there, you probably have to hard crash it and the email you were scripting up may be in your drafts or might not be.
If you are getting these WSOD’s often within Outlook, you may want to book some time with me as I have a few setting changes that can help lift that problem, or your email folder size may be too large and you will need to slim it down a bit. The WSOD with Outlook can also come from IMAP settings. I love and adore IMAP, so I had to clean up a lot of my email that was synching with IMAP, works much better now.
What I have learned to do is change settings, clean up the computer more and delete and manage my email better. For IE white screens, it is just using fewer tabs. All simple solutions to make the WSOD become less frequent.
If you are experiencing the WSOD and would like us to take a look at it, call us at 612-865-4475 or send us an email – info@callthatgirl.biz.
