Julie's Web Journal

I spent yesterday trying to get Outlook to work properly, and discovered after much wailing and gnashing of teeth that Outlook 2002 (and by extension earlier versions) do not fully work with Windows Vista. Here's the story if you want to get geeky. In a nutshell, Windows does not support the way passwords are stored in versions of Outlook prior to 2003. Outlook will not save the password. It also turns out that Outlook 2002 does not properly interface to the Contacts list because Microsoft has changed that as well. So you can't just start an e-mail, press the "To" button and select a list of recipients.

I wasted spent hours trying to resolve this problem. I read that Mozilla Thunderbird worked well and that there was an open source sync tool so I could sync everything up with my Pocket PC. I installed Thunderbird, got all of my messages moved over, but no sync. Tried everything I could. Messages were one thing, but what about the calendar? I tried both the Lightning plug-in for Thunderbird and the Sunbird calendar, and still couldn't get it to sync. Heck, Sunbird didn't even work properly. That will be fixed, I'm sure, by the Mozilla development team, but I need e-mail and calendar functions NOW. I need to be able to sync everything up with my Pocket PC. (Yeah, I could use a - gasp! - paper agenda, but the Pocket PC has been a life-changing experience for this chronically disorganized person.)

I discovered the new Mail, Calendar, and Contacts functions of Windows Vista. These replace (and enhance) the old Outlook Express. They look pretty nifty, and will probably do a serviceable job. The only problem is that Microsoft decided that they shouldn't sync with the Pocket PC or Smartphones. What a boneheaded idea! I read that Microsoft has that capability on the drawing board, and that many people are in the same boat as I.

So I bit the bullet and bought Outlook 2007 last night. Outlook comes in the same spiffy new packaging as Windows Vista. And I mean "spiffy" in a purely ironic manner. Be ware that when you pull the seal with the nice red OPEN instruction emblazoned in nice, friendly letters that there is still a nearly invisible seal right next to the convenient pull-tab used to open the case. Inside the Outlook package is one DVD and two pieces of paper. The instructions take up one side of one half sheet of paper and consist of the following: Put the DVD in the drive. Well, I'd never have known that.

On the plus side, Outlook 2007 is spiffy, and I do mean that in a non-ironic manner. It's just easier to use. And I just discovered that it imported SpamBayes. I haven't actually tried that, but it appears to be working. That would be nice, since I had spent a long time training those spam filters. Now I just have to get Outlook and SpamBayes to work in concert. I'll get there.

The rest of my aging Office suite seems to work just fine, so I'm not inclined up upgrade at this time. Oh, that's another major annoyance - upgrade pricing is not available for the standalone version of Outlook.

The other major annoyance seems to be fixable - I was having some very slow startup issues. It turns out that I pointed the photo slide show gadget at a networked drive with lots of high-res pictures. It's choking, and understandably so. I'll move some of my best pictures to the local hard drive and see if that makes a difference.

And on top of everything else my USB hub/card reader died yesterday. The backplane connector snapped right off of the circuit board. When that happened I got a Blue Screen of Death message that I'd been seeing off and on lately. I couldn't pin it down. Thought it was a driver issue on the motherboard, but now I'm thinking it was caused by the fact that the connector was probably loose for some time. I replaced that as well last night.

I still have a few bits to get off of the hold hard drive, such as my fonts. And somehow my invoices didn't make the move. I've got paper backups of the invoices, but it would be nice to have everything available in the software so I can do reports on aging and payments.

So, are we having fun, yet? I'm not sure. I think I'm through the worst of it. And the thing is, I'm not a big Microsoft basher, but I'm also getting less and less enamored with the way they're doing some things. On the other hand, major upgrades on any OS mean that some older software just isn't going to work. I can accept that. I just wish I'd known about Outlook ahead of time. It would have saved me a day of frustration.

Now it's time to get some REAL work done. I've got a CatCam gadget to tweak!

Tags: Technology, Windows Vista