Small Business Networking
A puzzle, some junk, electric sheep
First up this week, a question for Outlook users: In the calendar you have, by default, the Navigation Pane displayed on the left. In the menu it indicates this is a toggle that uses the shortcut ALT+F1.
We're using Outlook 2003 Service Pack 2, and when we press ALT+F1 nothing happens. We are also running a tool we absolutely couldn't live without, Caelo's Nelson Email Organizer Free 3.1, but we don't think that's the problem. Any ideas anyone?
Our second topic is stuff you don't need. Yep, when you start poking around in Windows, it is staggering what you can find that is running but doesn't need to be. What brought this topic to mind was finding the Java Update utility, jusched.exe, running on one of our PCs.
This piece of code doesn't take up much processor power, but its average working memory is about 692KB and its peak working memory is about 2,032KB. That doesn't sound too bad, but when you've got a dozen or more unnecessary processes just hanging around, you could be sacrificing 20MB of RAM or more!
Maybe it is our old-school background that makes this waste of resources so irritating. Back then a byte saved was, well, a byte saved; you bit packed data where you could and actually optimized code performance. But we had long sideburns and wore bell-bottoms, so it proves what you win on the swings you loose on the roundabouts.
In most Windows PCs you'll find a veritable cloud of "quick" launchers and helper utilities for applications such as iTunes, WinZIP and WinAmp (not to mention the aforementioned jusched.exe). And don't get us started on all the little support components for HP's printer and fax software. Death by overengineering.
One of the easiest ways to get rid of this crud is to run up msconfig.exe and look at the entries under the Startup and Services tabs. You will be surprised at how much junk is running. Just uncheck the boxes next to an unwanted program or service entry, and it will no longer get loaded at start-up. You can usually also kill the running versions of these items, but occasionally something ugly will happen, so rebooting tends to be safest. Note that sometimes the software that these chunks of code support will reenable the item.
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