Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Miscellania’ Category

Totally off-topic here, but I’m hoping it might help someone.

I’ve had a problem for a while now, where every time I run Excel 2003 (on Office XP), I get a message saying “Please wait while Office Configures Office Professional”. Excel then waits for a while, without prompting me for the Office installation disks (which it does for some people with the same problem). It then does the same thing again. And finally I can get into Excel. That takes maybe 3-4 minutes each time, which is very annoying, as I use Excel alot.

I’ve searched …
… and searched …
… and searched …
… for a solution, to no avail.

Till today.

Basically, if you have this error:

• go to your Event Log (go to Start > Run, enter eventvwr.exe, press return)
• Right-click the Applications option on the left, and clear the events
• Run excel, wait for it to finish the installation
• Refresh the event viewer list (F5 key)
• There, you’ll probably find a few entries. Double click the first one, then use the Up/Down arrows to get to the one that has a code of 1004 against it). That’s the important one.
• If you find reference to a missing component, that points to the registry, then it might help to simply create a REG_SZ key in the place it indicates with the appropriate name. In my case, it was in the Shell Extensions/Approved part of the Current windows section. I forget the exact place.

And if none of that makes sense, find someone who knows how to hack the XP registry, make sure they back it up first, and point them to this URL.

Hope that helps.

I recently wrote about how I developed the software in response to an article by a well-known marketer.

That marketer has reviewed the software, and said that he likes it and will share the details in his next newsletter.

Now, this guy has been around for YEARS. Years and years and years. In fact, he was one of the first “names” I recognized as being worth listening to. His reputation is fantastic. So I’m guessing the size and responsiveness of his list is equally fantastic.

I’ll share who he is, what he writes about , and how many new subscribers I get as a result, after he publishes the update… and if he agrees that it’s OK.

I use Outlook for email when at work. I use the Lookout plugin to search those emails. Or I should say, I used to use it, until for some reason it started using massive amounts of my PCs available memory each time I walked away from my desk for more than a couple of minutes.

Apparently, that’s when it scanned my emails to keep it’s database up to date. And also apparently, when you minimise Outlook, the CPU resources were freed. Not on my machine, they weren’t.

The solution was to minimise my Outlook window BEFORE that scan kicked in. The only other option was CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the task manager, wait 5 minutes for task manager to open on the 1% of CPU power it could access, and then end Outlook. Not neat, not clever, and very frustrating.

Fortunately, I’ve just found Swept Away, which automatically minimises unused programs after a configurable number of minutes.

Let’s hope it resolves this problem. I trust that Lookout will still keep scanning my emails, but do so quietly in the background. Just as it was supposed to.

NB: this is slightly outside the scope of this blog’s normal posts, but it’s worth posting, as it’s the only workable solution I’ve found online to this problem. And trust me, I’ve looked and looked and looked.