Before Disaster Strikes

I recently got a call from a friend that visited a web-site and wound up with a fake security alert program. Her computer slowed way down and kept giving pop-ups telling her she was infected and urging her to buy the program to clean it up. Not a big problem as the fake program is easily detected and cleaned by MBAM (available HERE). Unfortunately, she didn't have MBAM installed and when she downloaded and installed it, the fake program deleted the MBAM.EXE on installation (the security alert program was very good at protecting itself). If MBAM were already installed, the fake program would have been unable to do that. Again, not a big problem. I sent her a re-named EXE in a zip file. It just needed to be extracted to the MBAM Program folder and double clicked to run MBAM. Of course she didn't have a third party zip program and Windows native compression wouldn't allow her to extract the file (blocked for security). For some reason, she couldn't unblock it. Once again, not a big problem. She downloaded and installed 7-ZIP (available HERE)and extracted the EXE, ran the program and cleaned the problem. This was after several hours of work dealing with a slow computer and annoying "YOU ARE INFECTED" pop-ups. It could have been dealt with fairly simply if the needed programs were already in place. The lesson learned is to not wait until the middle of a problem to get the necessary things to deal with it.

Must Have Tools for Outlook Express

Over the years I have discovered that OE is a very simple mail program to maintain and repair. A lot of the problems that occur involve working with DBX files to resolve them. Most people find that working with DBX's can be complicated. The proper tools can make the difference between a confusing, frustrating process and a (relatively) easy, successful repair. The single thing I've found that causes the most confusion is finding the DBX files. Most of the instructions you'll find tell you to open OE, click this, click that, blah, blah, blah. There is a simple tool that not only finds them, but will open the folder for you. Download Open OE Store.vbs To download. FF: Right click the link>Save Link as IE: Should download at click or Right click>Save Target as Note: If it downloads as a text file, rename the extension from .txt to .vbs This simple script "reads" the registry entries created when OE was last opened, determines what Identity was last in use, and opens the proper Message Store folder for that Identity. You can have OE open, double click the VBS to run it, and the Message Store will open. You even get a warning to close OE before making changes in the Store folder. Closing OE is a must before working with the DBX files, so that's a good reminder to do it. There are several other useful tools that can be obtained HERE , but the Open-OE-Store.vbs is the one I consider an absolute must.
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Another tool that is a must have is a DBX viewer. The MiTec MailView is the most versatile I've found. DOWNLOAD HERE This allows you to open DBX files to see what messages they may contain. That's especially useful for checking backups to see if they will work before trying to restore them to OE and more importantly to see if newly created backups are good. More on the viewer and it's uses can be found HERE on my Reference page. __________________ When you are unable to load or Import a DBX file into OE due to corruption of the file, I don't think there's a better tool than DBXtract for recovering messages from the damaged file. A freeware version of this program can be obtained HERE. It does the job quite nicely in most instances. Basic instructions for it's use are located HERE. An updated version with more features can be purchased from the developer HERE. If you've lost messages that are really important to you, it's well worth the meager price. ___________________ Those are the three tools I consider "Must Haves" for recovering lost messages in OE.

How this blog started

I have a friend that asked me how to link a banner on his blog. Now, I know a fair amount about computers, but very little about HTML and web design. I decided to look into it and figured the best way to learn is to just do it. I've always believed experience is the best teacher, so I guess this will show what kind of student I am. I have no idea what I'll do with this blog. It will be interesting to see what it evolves into.