Shorten The Road

Hope all of you enjoyed your holiday (Labor Day) weekend; we got some nice weather in the tri-state area.

I recently stumbled across this site.

http://www.ipod-video-converter.org/

This software can convert your DVDs into the iPod format with a variety of options. During the conversion process you will be able to choose the video size, video quality and audio quality. Of course, the higher these settings are, the greater the disk space consumption will be. The conversion process can take a long time, so the “shut down computer automatically after conversion” comes in handy.

Getting on a plane and you have not caught up on all the Shorten the Road posts? Or by some small chance you have other websites you frequent in which you are not up to date on? HTTrack is a neat little utility which will help you browser websites offline.

http://www.httrack.com/

HTTrack helps you facilitate downloading WWW sites into a local directory on your computer. It even has options to help you streamline your downloads; for example you can choose to exclude or include links based on a variety criterion.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

My team supports 500+ computers (both laptops and desktops) and occasionally someone will ‘crash’ his or her machine. We have various methods for recovering the data, including a product called SpinRite. Our success rate on this product is 33% on a sample size of 6. We wished we had a higher success rate from the product, however, for those who fell into the 33%, they were ecstatic to recover all their data. Productivity gained from them not trying to recover data from various sources was well worth the licensing paid for the product.

There has been some criticism of the product, which can be found at:
SpinRite_Criticism

PST19UPG - Password Strip

At work, we are currently using Microsoft Outlook 2000 and occasionally have some users who have password protected their PST files. Most of these users choose to utilize the automatic login, which eventually causes the users some heartache when their machines are replaced and need to re-enter their passwords (which they don’t remember).

Thank you Microsoft for creating a utility to help us with this situation. The utility was not originally created to strip passwords; it was designed to upgrade the PST format to version 19. Imagine the outlash Microsoft would have endured if they created the utility with the primary purpose of stripping passwords; although, it was a pretty big oversight to release the utility with this type of side-effect.

Using this utility is a quick way my team handles many of these types of situations. For the later PST versions, we have the users create a new PST file on the older system (along side with the original PST file) and then copy their content.