Safari for Windows

Earlier this week Apple let loose the Safari 3 browser beta on its Windows brethren. And the world rejoiced!

Ofcourse, I'm about a week late in rejoicing.

I visited the pcmag.com home page this morning and lo and behold! There was this article on the Apple Safari 3 beta for Windows. I promptly installed it and within a few minutes it has become my default browser.

There's only one word that I have for the Safari browser as of now - awesome! The pages do indeed load much faster. And the interface is absolutely out of this world - press CTRL-D to bookmark a page and a panel "flips" out from top of the browser to ask you where you want to add the bookmark!

And I would say that the inline page find (go ahead, press CTRL-F and then type in some text - see what happens) on its own makes it worth having Safari as your default browser.

Though Apple has not created an "official" extensions architecture for Safari it does have several extensions available (see www.pimpmysafari.com) like Firefox. I'm not sure if these work on the Windows avatar as well, need to check some out soon.

Finally there's one thing I need to ask of Apple (that is, if they read this blog!) - what took you so long? Come on, release Windows versions of the other great Apple software out there. I can't wait to use GarageBand and Pages 2 on Windows.

Or perhaps you just want all of us to buy the Intel Macs after drooling on iTunes and Safari, dreaming about the better life that awaits us...

Error code 0x80040116 in Outlook 2007

When trying to click 'Settings' on a PST file in Outlook 2007 (File > Data File Management) I kept getting an error code 0x80040116.

I had the problem with both my Archive PST file as well as the main Personal Folders PST file. I was able to resolve the problem with Archive PST by just closing and re-opening the Archive Folders i.e. right click 'Archive Folders' and then select 'Close Archive Folders'. Then go to File > Data File Management and click 'Add' and add the 'Archive.pst' file (or whatever its called on your system) back to Outlook. You can use this method for other PST files too (except for the main Personal Folders outlook.pst file - which you cannot 'close').

For the Personal Folders PST file the procedure is as follows.

1. Click File > Data File Management and then click "Open Folder" to open the folder where Outlook stores the data files. Keep this Explorer window open.

2. Exit from Outlook.

3. On the Explorer window that you opened in the first step you'll see a file called 'outlook.pst' and this is the main Personal Folders PST file (at least all systems I've seen so far always call it 'outlook.pst').

4. Now copy and paste this outlook.pst file to some other folder (lets say you put it on your desktop and rename it to outlook1.pst). And just to be sure you have a backup, copy and paste the outlook.pst again to another folder too! This process may take a while especially if you have a large PST file.

5. Now open Outlook and delete all of the folders you have under 'Personal Folders' (yes go ahead and do it!). You should be able to delete all of them except for the system folders such as Deleted Items, Drafts, Inbox, Junk E-mail, Outbox, RSS feeds, Sent Items and Search Folders.

6. Now empty the deleted items by clicking 'Tools' and then 'Empty Deleted Items folder'.

7. Next open the copy of outlook.pst (i.e. the outlook1.pst file from step 4) by going File > Data File Management and then clicking 'Add'.

8. Outlook will now open one more 'Personal Folders' folder. This would have all of the email etc that you originally had in the main Personal Folders.

9. Now just drag and drop the folders and email back into the main Personal Folders folder (the one at the top). E.g. email in the Inbox of the second Personal Folders folder goes into the Inbox of the Personal Folders at the top, email in the Sent Items of the second Personal Folders goes into the Sent Items of the one at the top, folders in the second Personal Folders go into the first Personal Folders and so on.

10. Once that is over close the second Personal Folders (the outlook1.pst one) by right clicking it and selecting 'Close Personal Folders'.

11. You can now go to File > Data File Management and click 'Settings' on your Personal Folders and see the Settings dialog.

**MANDATORY WARNING** You're playing with your email here, so be extra careful! You don't want to delete hundreds of years of stored messages in one click!

** NOTE ** I am assuming you don't have an MS Exchange connection from your Outlook or any similar fancy stuff. If you do then the above procedure may not work for you. I don't use an Exchange server so I don't know if the procedure works in such cases.

svchost.exe - application error

If you get this error:

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
svchost.exe - application error
The instruction at "0x745f2780" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "read".
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

And also a error dialog about "Generic Host process for Win32 services", then do this to resolve the problem:

1. Boot into safe mode
2. Disable automatic updates in Windows
3. Reboot system into normal mode
4. Do a manual Windows update
5. Enable automatic updates in Windows
4. Reboot once again


It looks like a recent Windows auto-update messed things up and Windows kept giving the above error on startup. I got this error this morning and was in "safe mode" till I found the above solution.

I actually found "safe mode with networking" much faster and better than the regular "unsafe" mode of Windows. More about that later. :-)