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Vance Hunt
has provided home-user help desk style support for his consulting company for over 6 years. Making his home in beautiful Southern California, Vance provides general computer Q&A for users via his weekly column.
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 | Friday, September 15, 2006 |
| Take command of Outlook. |
| By Vance Hunt |
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I hate the reading pane in Outlook. Is there a way to just shut it off without having to set it individually on each folder or view?
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Outlook XP and 2003 come with some "back-door" methods for controlling some
aspects of the program, such as starting Outlook in a specific folder,
regenerating profile registry data, starting in safe mode, starting with a
specific profile, and turning off the reading pane (just to name a few).
All these tasks are done by passing command line arguments to Outlook on launch.
You can pass the data either by using the Start | Run dialog, or by altering a
shortcut to Outlook (the icon for Outlook on your desktop is probably not an
actual shortcut, so you can't modify it - but the one on the Quick Launch bar
is).
We'll start by creating a new shortcut on the Desktop. Right-click the
desktop and select New | Shortcut. Press the Browse button and navigate to
where Outlook is installed (typically "C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE##\OUTLOOK.EXE"). Before pressing the
Next button, put your cursor back into the location field, and press the End key
to move to the very end. After the quote, type a space and then
/nopreview. Press Next and Change the Name to
"Outlook", then press Finish. When you launch Outlook this way, Outlook
will launch with the Reading Pane off, and in XP the option to turn the Reading
Pane on is removed from the View menu.
For a longer list of command line options available to control Outlook, check
out
this Microsoft page for XP and
this Microsoft page for 2003.
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I am looking for a command program that can find and modify the registry key (Windows XP or 2003) that stores wireless SSID. Do you know any program that can do this?
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Practically everybody but Windows has a generic interface into wireless
settings with the ability to manipulate most of the settings from the command
line. Windows, not so much. For the most part, although Windows has
a few structured locations for setting where data should be stored, stored data
is highly determined by the NIC card driver and can vary from vendor to vendor,
as well as Windows platform to Windows platform. For instance, if you open the
XP registry and go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\ WZCSVC\Parameters\Interfaces
you will see many subkeys named as GUIDs, and within those, subkeys named
ActiveSettings, LayoutVersion,
ControlFlags, etc. Most of this data is in binary, but some
manufacturer's store this in plain text.
I would start by looking at the NIC card vendor's web site for either a WMI
provider or a command line utility that you can use to modify settings.
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