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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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Icon of Vance HuntFriday, March 04, 2005
Desktop shortcuts to dynamic email creation, booting your computer to a keychain USB drive - and figuring out why your computer stopped running after that *snap* and puff of smoke happened - this week!
By Vance Hunt
 
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Q: I send a lot of emails every day to pretty much the same people. The subject line never changes and the first few lines of the emails are always the same. I have a draft message in Outlook that I can copy and paste, then open and edit, but that is a lot of steps. Any way to shorten the process?
 
A: If you are sending a highly formatted message (HTML or RTF), then I suggest you stick with what you are doing.  There are creative ways within Outlook that you can fake email templates using forms or (worse) stationary, but none of them are really a time saver or require less steps than the process you already undertake.

If, however, you are less concerned with format, and just want a plain email starter, you can actually create a Windows shortcut that will generate an email message for you, complete with recipients, a subject line, and a basic body.  Start by opening Notepad.  Once you're in, type the following, replacing the data in { } with the suggested fields:

mailto:{email1@domain.com}?subject={Subject Line}&body={Opening Sentence}

Keep the following in mind:

  • No line breaks, keep it all on one line (don't hit the enter key)
  • Multiple email addresses can be specified by separating them with commas
  • Some versions of Windows do not recognize spaces within the shortcut, so if you have issues, replace your spaces with the phrase: %20
  • Some versions of Windows will not let you edit the target line once the shortcut is created.  Save your notepad file somewhere safe if you want to edit it later.

Next, copy the text only to the clipboard.  Go to where you want your shortcut, and follow the steps to create a new shortcut, pasting your text in where it asks for the location of the item.  Name it what you want.  When you double click it, a new email message will be created and made available for you to edit. 



Q: I recently added a second internal hard drive to my desktop.  While fumbling about in there, I lost a screw.  I can hear it rattling about every now and then when I move my computer, but I can't find it.  Should I care?
 
A: If I was speaking to you as a sales representative from Big Computer Guys, Inc., I would say No!   However, as a cousin of Mr. Regular Joe, I'll offer you this advice:  Screws are long metal pieces.  Your computer is plugged into the wall, and as you can see when you peer inside, the inner workings are all exposed.  What do you suppose can happen if the metal screw finds itself laying across two charged pathways on either the system board or a system component?  Hint: sticking a fork in the electrical socket can produce similar results.


Q: Many of my computer's do not come with floppy drives. For recovery purposes, it would be nice to have a bootable device other than a CD-ROM that I could carry with me. Can a keychain USB drive be bootable?
 
A: Yes, USB objects can be bootable, but ONLY if the local computer's BIOS supports it, and not everyone's does.  You can easily check by entering into your BIOS and looking for any mention of USB devices that can be enabled, and finally looking under the boot sequence for a mention of a USB device.  The names for the USB device can vary by BIOS vendor, so you will need to explore around a bit.  If your BIOS doesn't mention it, you can look at upgrading your BIOS to the latest version and seeing if that enables support.

So, once supported and/or enabled, all you need to do is change your USB keychain drive from the static file holder that it is, to a bootable disk, similar to a standard bootable floppy or CD-ROM.  There are numerous ways to do this, many of which are easily Googled, or you can look at purchasing a shareware product such as FlashBoot which can create / transfer bootable disk images to USB quickly.

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