Tag Archives: microsoft

Microsoft Outlook and Network Stored PST Files Don't Work

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Out of service
Photo From nic­olas­nova

I was recently called out to a new cli­ent site to stop a Microsoft Out­look 2010 cli­ent from crash­ing every time email was sent or received. It took a while to dis­cover the cause of the prob­lem because the issue was related to a con­fig­ur­a­tion that has not been sup­por­ted by Microsoft since Exchange Server 5.0 was released in 1997. So, not some­thing I’d expect to find any­one still using.

Don’t Store PST files on a net­work share

Accord­ing to Microsoft, among the con­sequences of using a net­work share to store pst files are:

When you store .pst files [on a net­work share], shares may stop respond­ing. This beha­vior may cause sev­eral client-side prob­lems, such as caus­ing Out­look to stop respond­ing or freez­ing desktops on cli­ent computers.

There is some fur­ther inform­a­tion and ana­lysis over on the tech­net blog, includ­ing addi­tional prob­lems caused on the server side, from way back in 2007!

Hope­fully this inform­a­tion will jog the memory of future troubleshoot­ers or give them another place to look when try­ing to solve prob­lems with Microsoft Outlook.

Backing up Your Data - Do it

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Here is a little real-world scen­ario. You are off on a two week busi­ness trip that is going to take you half way around the world and you have been plan­ning it for months. The day before you leave, you work in your office get­ting organ­ised for the trip and then head home to pre­pare for your flight. Later in the even­ing you turn on your laptop and it says:

Windows XP Corrupt Registry Message on Boot

Win­dows XP Cor­rupt Registry Message

This is a true story, the cli­ent called me at 7:30pm and needed to be on a train at 8:30am the fol­low­ing morn­ing. In the course of invest­ig­at­ing the issue I found that no backup of the laptop or Win­dows sys­tem disks were taken and the hard disk con­tained many busi­ness crit­ical doc­u­ments and thou­sands of emails.

I could not fix the prob­lem there and then and had to take it back to my lab to safely backup the data, fix the registry cor­rup­tion and get the sys­tem boot­ing again. The cli­ent had to leave without his laptop but we shipped it out the same day to catch up with him at his first stop in China, all adding up to a big bill.

To para­phrase Henry Rollins:

Don’t talk about it, do it! If you didn’t backup, man. You blew it!

If you have been think­ing about back­ing up your com­puter you really need to do it, now.