And now for something …

If you use Outlook at work, as I do, then you’ve probably experienced an annoying “feature” — the email address auto complete.  Here’s the scenario: you went to email Bob (your friend) but instead Bob (your boss) came up, and before you realized it, your boss became the lucky recipient of a friendly letter about how great he is, how much you love your job, etc.  (This has actually never happened to me — but I have sent an email to a customer that was supposed to go to a colleague, which was at least mildy embarrasing).  Probably you should stop using your work email for sending personal messages, but that’s beside the point. You could also turn off the auto complete, but it’s actually pretty useful.  My answer to an issue which has plagued Outlookers since the beginning of Outlooking is simply to set a delay on the send/receive feature.  This also has a very helpful side effect — if you send an email, and then realize that you left something out, made a spelling mistake, forgot to cc someone or attach a file, or just forgot to add that cute picture of your dog underneath your signature, then you have a chance to correct your error without having to send yet another email saying “oops!  Here’s the doggie pic”.Helpfully, this feature is enabled by default, especially for folks who connect to an Exchange server.  To add this delay, there are a few steps (this is from Outlook 2007, but Outlook 2003 and earlier should be similar).

• Schedule an automatic send/receive for your accounts. Go to Tools >  Send/Receive > Send/Receive Settings > Define Send/Receive Groups.  Select the group name “All Accounts” (or whatever group you wish to configure),  and click Edit.  Check the box for “Include the selected account in this group”, and then click OK.  Next, go to the “Setting for group ‘All Accounts’” at the bottom of the screen, and check the box for “Include this group in send/receive” and “Schedule an automatic send/receive every xx minutes” and enter your desired delay.
• Turn off the “send immediately when connected” option. Go to Tools > Options and click the Mail Setup tab, then uncheck the “send immediately when connected box”.
• Enjoy a little more sanity in your life.
• Bonus. Here is a helpful tip, which explains how to create a rule which will delay sending an email: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2008/04/14/a-safety-net-for-the-send-button.aspx

… suddenly you can’t open any more Windows in Windows XP!

There appears to be a limit of about 30 or 40 open windows (including tabs in Firefox / IE7) in Windows XP, which can get pretty irritating if you have two monitors like I do, and often have many tasks going on at the same time (or many webpages open). When this happens, other weird things start to occur, like the inability to use the right-click function, or strange errors when attempting to open a submenu from some app or even an email in Outlook.

Fortunately, there is a solution, courtesy Tony Schreiner’s Blog — increase the size of the Windows Desktop heap via the registry.

The registry key is:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems]

Look for the value
Windows=”%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe

and edit it. You’ll see a long string like this:

ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,512 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16″

Just change the 3072 to a larger value such as 8192.