Win 8 HOT STUFF..!

I started using windows 8 (beta version) since Sept. 2012. After reviewing the new OS, I would rate this as HOT STUFF and fantabulous on the placards. I have come across lot of them saying 'windows 8 is a crap'. But, in reality is not. The point is, one should actually know how to use it.  Improvised technology released with a new version is always the better than the previous is what I would say in general. "You have to adapt the technology, it's shortcuts and its transition methodology..!"

Animation Converter Software

I used Text Logo Maker to create swf file and converted swf file to gif using free swf to gif converter.

Motto of The Scholars International School Doha, Qatar  (CBSE Indian School)

Solution: Outlook 2010 Search Not Working

 

Search feature in Outlook saves 10 times of your manual email search time. Do you still need a manual search in this hoo-ha world? So, why not if the feature is not working get it sorted out.

Outlook 2010 Search Not Working

Applies to: Windows 7 OS with upgrade of Office 2010 with Outlook from Office 2007 or 2003.

as per articles I tried re-building index, however didn't work for me.

re-indexing in outlook 2010, showed no satisfactory results..

In windows XP, installing 'windows search' plug-in showed the proper results, however complaints were reported about performance of system and was a bottle neck for such plug-ins.

For OS windows 7 onwards:

Considering the solution from lots of articles was to Turn Windows Indexing Service back on.

1. Control Panel >> Programs >> Programs and Features >> Turn Windows Features on or off

2. Tick (check mark) the Indexing Service check box and hit OK

You may want to restart your computer just for good measure.  You will need to wait for a while for the indexing service to Index everything (many hours), but after a short time (half hour) you can check your email search bar and find that some of your email is now showing in the search results.

This feature worked for one of the reported client in our org. However, for me the status of index remained the same. Search results didn't either show any results.

So I disabled and turned the feature OFF as it was earlier. If you don't turn off, unnecessary resource would be added at the background and such piled up resources at a later stage will create performance bottleneck.

So, the only solution for me was to REPAIR the Office 2010. And in next 15 mins it showed the results positively.

To do this in win 7 just click start and type programs and features and click the result as seen below:

Click Change option under microsoft office 2010 which will bring up the option to repair the corrupted office files

selection window

progression window

The overall process might take 15mins. That's it. After a reboot of system, my search results showed results as expected.

Completing 7 yrs with RA

Email from Supervisor:

To: Rinith KT
Subject: RE: Completing 7 yrs with RA

Sent: Tuesday, 26 February, 2013

Rinith,

You have done exceptionally well since I have started working here. We have achieved significant milestones in last 5 years and you have played pivotal role in most of them. You're quick learner, sincere, hardworking and dependable which are very good qualities for an IT professional. I am absolutely confident that you will do well under the new leader. I will miss you all after June.

Best of luck

Umesh

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Email to Supervisor

From: Rinith KT
Sent: Tuesday, 26 February, 2013

There are some magical numbers in life to bestow upon and I surely consider completing another gracious milestone of  7 Years as RA Employee

I can keep writing this on-and-on, but let me pause and appreciate some good things that did happen:

• Great Learning – I have said this to a number of my colleagues. The learning experience that I get just by being inside RA is a zillion!!! I learn from every single conversation that happen here. Connection with Microsoft at all innovative levels (GP, SharePoint, Cloud computing, HyperV, SQL Consolidation), other infrastructure support vendors AvePoint, Symantec, McAfee, VMWare,  Websense, Citrix, and so on, is so much fun. I don’t have words to express the same.
• Great people and friends – I think this is the best of the best part. I have made exceptionally great friends in this journey of completing 7 years. Many inside the company with the interactions, and multiples of them outside the company too. Some of ex-colleagues still in constant touch with me across the globe.
• Passion with mix-Community – IT community is endless which keeps on crawling ever since past 17 years of my entry to IT domain and is still going strong. I had also opportunities to share my tech expertise to other communities outside the company.
• New Challenges everyday – It sometimes comes down to what I am doing new to keep my interest levels on the high. You will be surprised that, it is not the routine job functions that keep me busy but the new challenges to try and do something new for self and for the best interest of business continuity and projects in the sessions is what makes every day drive to the office exciting. It is not always that you get to do what you love, but find opportunity to explore and do your bit to learn what you love the most.

So, thank you once again for being an exemplary supervisor which I believe is the strongest pillar behind an employee’s success.

-Rinith

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From: Rinith KT
Sent: Sunday, 26 February, 2012 17:15
To: IT-Group
Subject: completing 6 yrs with RA

Dears,

I would like to take this opportunity to talk about a great milestone here at RA today. Today, I complete 6 years of my journey at the RA. 2 years of a journey filled with stories of struggles from pillar-to-post, and thereafter success, fights, fun and joy with greater IT professionals of different calibres. This journey is made even more memorable because of the larger effort that each one of you put in here at work. I take pride in THANKING each and every one of you here for the continual support given to me. With the advent of this milestone in my life and with RA, I intend to extend myself as a ‘sailor’ and further dig & explore all the possible hidden treasures in me… neither boasting nor going more philosophical.. so, thank you all once again for the candy-coated smiles.

-Rinith

Facebook identity page for Scholarsqatar

Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/Scholarsqatar

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TSIS - A unique Indian School in Doha

Our Motto

The Scholars’ International School, approved by the Ministry of Education, State of Qatar, is a distinctive co-educational Indian School with an international perspective following the CBSE syllabus. It is a resource centre that focuses on learning which is purposeful and achievement-oriented, promoting innovation in learning experiences.  Here scholars discover themselves and achieve their full potential. The school is the brainchild of a group of like-minded individuals who have a great passion for quality education and value-building.

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Ways to free up space on your windows OS

Reclaim space after applying Windows 7/2008 R2 Service Pack 1

I recently noticed that the free space on 60GB OS partiton on our production servers were running very low on space. Some of this was due to old offline files which I managed to cleanup fine.

If RAM is upgraded there might be chances of the pagefile to grow in direct proportion with the amount of memory, soon you will be running out of disc space.

Therefore, I searched around for ways to clear up large amounts of space and here are a few that I found most effective (and of course, this would work on any Windows 7 system, regardless of hard drive type or size):

1. Disable hibernation:

If you don't use the hibernate feature, turn it off – it's a quick and easy way to save a bunch of space as it creates a 'hiberfil.sys' file in the root of your C drive to dump the contents of your memory for when your system hibernates.  For example, if I were to disable hibernation on this machine, I'd clear up about 6gb of storage space!  (note, in order to see this file in explorer, you'll need to enable viewing hidden/protected operating system files)

To disable hibernation, open a command window with administrator privileges by right clicking Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator

and type:

powercfg –h off

You probably won't see any sort of confirmation, but if you look back at the root of your C drive, you'll see that hiberfil.sys is gone and you now have a lot more free space.   (thanks to www.howtogeek.com for showing how to do this!)

2. Clean up your WINSXS directory:

In trying to find things to delete to free up space, I ran across a program called WinDirStat which helped me find files and directories that were taking up a lot of space – besides the hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys, one of the largest culprits was the c:\windows\winsxs directory which was initially taking up 10.2gb on my machine. TreeSize s/w also is handy tool to discover folder size:

After a bit of research I managed to use the command below and reduced the winsxs by 7GB 

The process almost takes 15-25mins and I could attain a total of 7GB space on primary drive.

With that info in hand, I found out that the winsxs directory basically holds files pertaining to installing of programs, windows updates, and items like that . Anyway, there's a way to clean some of this up by running a command to delete some of these files.  Depending on what updates you have performed (such as Service Pack 1), this may not do anything, but go ahead and try.

The tool you will be running is the "Deployment Image Servicing and Management Tool" – when I ran it, it shrunk my winsxs directory from 10.2GB down to 6.8GB which freed up another 3.4GB.  To do so, run an elevated command prompt again (like with disabling hibernation above), and run the following command:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

(as mentioned, depending on your setup, you may not have any service packs to clean up, in which case you'll get a message such as the one below:)

3. Move your program installer files:

Every time you install a program, there's also an 'uninstall' file that is left behind that will let you repair/uninstall that program.  As it turns out, a lot (all?) of these files are stored in the \windows\installer directory and can take up a lot of space.   What you can do is move these files to a different location so you can free up space (and if you need to uninstall, upgrade, change any of those programs, simply move the files back before hand).  Navigate to the C:\windows\installer directory and sort by file size. 

Now, you probably could just move all of these files, but I just chose to remove the larger ones that would free up the most space.  If you want to know what program uninstaller you are moving (so you can move it back in case you want to edit or uninstall it), simply right click it, select properties, and choose the Details tab.  For example, "140e3d3.msi", weighing in at ~102MB, is the uninstaller for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4RC: 

So, you would just simply move it off to another other hard drive to free up 102MB!  Continue to do this for any other files you want to move to save more space.

also refer

Check folder size for housekeeping directories

Check folder size for housekeeping directories

Housekeeping for the local volumes

I used Treesize freeware to review folder size including sub-folders for cleaning unwanted traces of leftovers. I could easily identify where under C Drive (primary partition) folders were over utilized especially when the production servers (Windows 2008 Ent R2) alerted low disc space. I could identify winsxs directory and installer directory over unwanted utilization and could sort the disc space by running DISM commands.

Treesize screenshot

  

Another freeware is WinDirStat which gives graphical representation of the oversized folders. I used this to clean my laptop

WinDirStat screenshot

Its all a very handy software free of errors.