Outlook 2007 running slow

Is your outlook 2007 running slow?? Did you upgrade to find that speed only decreased instead running better... I had this problem myself, It had nothing to do with VISTA or Outlook 2007 in general.. It was the ADD-INS inside outlook 2007...

If you have any of these symptoms you should try this for yourself.

Outlook starting up slow
Outlook starts "Not Responding"
You get pauses when going from email to email
Over all functions of OUTLOOK perform slow


1) open outlook
2) go to tools > trust center
3) go to Add-ins
4) on COM Add-ins > Click GO - When the new window appears Un-Check the Add-ins
5) on Exchange Client > Click GO - When the new window appears Un-Check the Add-ins
6) You can remove 1 add-in at a time and check if the performance improves. That way you can figure out exactly which add-in it is that is slowing down OUTLOOK... OR You can just Disable them ALL first, then just enable the ones you know and need...


I un-checked all the add-ins and my OUTLOOK Flys now with no slow down or no pauses at all what so EVER...

For me there was an old Virus Scanner I removed a long time ago, However... It kept an Add-in installed inside outlook even after I un-installed that software a long time ago...


Hope this helps people and hope they read this first because when I tried to Google this problem originally I found tons of posts about editing the registry, Hot fixes from microsoft, updates and patches, uninstalling and reinstalling outlook, running the repair, You get the point... And it turned out to be a simple 1minute fix of removing the add-ins...


Enjoy

How To Setup a Cisco Switch from SCRATCH, Chapter 3:

Chapter 3

Express Setup

First time users will find this useful to get up and running quickly and hassle free.

So now you took your serial cable from chapter 2 got it hooked into your switch and pc or notebook and your ready to go. Now after you use hyper terminal or PuTTY to access your switch via COM port you will most likely be greeted with a command prompted "Wizard" (depending how old your switch is) this is not a bad way to jump start your switch quickly to get it barebones settings and working.

The setup will probably look like the picture below:

Click picture to Enlarge

Our first look at the cisco IOS

Once you click the image you can see that I went ahead and filled out most the settings as they should be. Let me cover the setup and answers in depth.

0) If you are NOT prompted with this express setup and want to try loading it here is how..
Type
Switch> enable
Then type
Switch#> setup
Simple eh?? :)

1) Would you like to continue with the setup dialog? yes
This is obviously telling the switch you want to use the express setup wizard to continue.
For advance users you can click "NO" if you prefer to everything manual and by hand, though I do not recommend that if you are reading this :P



2) Enter IP Address: 192.168.X.X
This is the IP you want to assign your switch, this is extremely helpful so in the future you can access the switch without having to use the serial cable. You can simple use Telnet or PuTTY. Since this is a switch and not a router the IP address is not too important of what you choose. If your not sure of your IP range just do an IPconfig.



3) Enter IP NETMASK: 255.255.255.0
This is the Subnet mask of your network... for most home or small networks you will use 255.255.255.0... if your not sure of your subnet just do an IPconfig.



4) Would you like to enter a Default Gateway Address: YES
Yes this is the IP of your router AKA gateway... This is how your switch will route traffic.. Meaning.. If you are plugged into your switch and your computer sends a request to go out on the Internet the switch will attempt to send that request to the Gateway (router), Therefore if the switch does not know where your router (gateway) is you won't be getting out anytime soon ;)~~~

Most gateways are .1 or sometimes .254

Your gateway if "Linksys" Router: 192.168.1.1
Your gateway if "Dlink" Router: 192.168.0.1
Your gateway if "Netgear" Router: 192.168.0.1


5) Enter Host name: Home-SW-1
This is the name you want to give your router, this is not too important in less you are on a bigger network and have a proper naming scheme to track your equipment. Feel free to put whatever you want... Call it Douche bag, Your going to access your switch via IP anyhow.



6) Enter Enable secret: *********
This is your password to access configuration items inside your switch.. Make this password something you will not forget. it can be whatever you want...

DO NOT MAKE THIS PASSWORD "cisco"

"cisco" is the default password for most the cisco's equipment making it this would be a stupid idea :P~



7) Would you like to configure a telnet password: YES
Telnet is how you will access your switch in the future also other people could access your switch threw telnet so you better put a password.



8) Enter your telnet password: ********
Some people will tell you not to make it the same password as your enable password but I keep my enable and telnet password the same to make life easier.

If you get prompted that you can not use the same password twice just retype your same password again (yes a second time even though it said NO), it will go threw this time and allow you to use the same password!! Vola !! stupid software is not going to tell us what to do!!!




9) Would you like to enable as a cluster command switch: NO
Switches in cluster use the switch clustering so that you can configure and troubleshoot a group of different cisco switch's through a single IP address. This could be helpful but not in our situation.




10) Use this Configuration?: YES

This will give you a brief overview of the setup and settings we picked. Cisco understands you are not like them - meaning you are not perfect, so they allow you a chance to go back and make some changes. Confirm everything is OK then click YES!!!! If not click NO and redo the setup, LOSER!!! ;)



DONE!! - You should now be able to access your switch via TELNET and IP address. You should also be able to access your network and internet now by being plugged in to your switch.



Next chapter we go more in depth setup, configuration and IOS commands.

Coming soon Chapter 4

Cisco Call Manager Attendant Problem

The Story:

I got a call while I was sleeping early about 6AM. The IT Director was calling to tell me that the operators at the hospital could not log in to the Cisco Attendant. First thing I thought of was the user name and passwords were wrong that is the most common issue when they can not log in. The Cisco Call Attendant reflects off the users Active Directory account - they use their regular domain account to log in but this time that was NOT the issue... The user names and passwords were correct. Turns out the Attendant service needed to be restarted on the Call Manager server, this time it was not just a password problem...

The Problem:

Users can not log in to the Attendant.

Example: PBX (operators) the users there log in to the Attendant to call and organize calls. If they get errors and can NOT login

The Solution:

1) Account Problem :

Reset password. The logins are based off the AD accounts. Sometimes users might have the wrong password, the account could be locked in Active Directory or they might just be trying the wrong user name.

2) The service has failed:

There is a “Cisco Call Manager Attendant Console Server” service inside the call manager. Sometimes this service can fail and will need to be restarted. Here is how to restart it.

Login to call manager http://XXXXXXXXX

Navigate to “Cisco Unified Serviceability” and click GO (top right of the screen)

From the menu go to Tools and “Control Center –Feature Services”

Select server “192.X.X.X” from the drop down menu and click GO

Under “CTI Services” Select the –Cisco CallManager Attendant Console Server- button, scroll down to the bottom of the left screen and click “RESTART”.

This is a good thing to note because you can also restart other critical services from here as well.. Also when I spoke to cisco they told me secretly it is good practice to restart any services that have been running for over 60 Days. Of course they would not advertise that with their products but thats what they honestly do recommend.

First Post!!!

Hi, This is my new IT Tech Blog.. This blog is going to contain helpful information related to Information Technology, So anything along the lines of networking, software and hardware.



A little about myself.

I am 28 Year old male working in the HEALTH CARE industry. The company I work for owns a Hospital in Long Beach CA also we own various clinics, pharmacy's, private doctor offices and of course our business offices. This being said Me and our team are responsible for roughly 1500 users...

A little about my everyday environment.

We have a WAN connected with Telepacific between our various sites. We have 2 main outs for our Internet split - one is threw Charter and the other is going threw TPAC as well.

We have mostly Windows XP machines for the end users, with a couple windows 2000 machines here and there, NO vista yet for the end users but some of the more PC sabby people have it (with no problems).

All of our routers are Cisco routers now and about 85% of our switches are also cisco. We still have some that have not been replaced yet..

Recently just migrated to Cisco VoIP solution at most of our main sites, We went from an older NORTEL system over to Cisco VoIP and rolled out over 500 IP phones in a week!!! It was a huge project and finally over, Thus we use Cisco Call Manager and Cisco Unity for voicemail.
Also 2 of our sites are using SHORTEL VoIP as an Alternate solution.

For internet and content filtering we use a device called FORTiGATE by a company called FORTiNET. This devices is an all in 1 solution... Content Filtering, Virus Protection, Spam Blocking, FIREWALL, Vpn Connections (SSL & IPsec) and MORE... This product has proved to be extremely good.

Servers... Our servers are Truly a mixed... The majority being Server 2003. We also have a few linux servers, Some IBM AIX unix servers and Windows 2000 Servers (almost gone). We decided to go with the HP series blade servers.. We also have a very nice SAN system by compellent which we have been using to virtualize more and more servers with VMware thus creating more physical resources for us.


We run 2 major web servers with IIS. We have our Intranet website running on a linux box using DEKIwiki. We have a public DNS server to publish our dns. For DHCP we went away from using Windows 2003 server like most companies use and we went with a solution called "Infoblox" This thing runs great and SO fast - it hands out DHCP addresses extremely fast, it is very easy to use and has a nice GUI...

That is just a short note of the things I handle on a daily bases. My hope is to be able to pass on any knowledge that I can from my daily experiences and learning's. There is a lot of tech related help stuff on the Internet but sometimes I find them to not be realist or not explain how something would be in a typical network and frankly sometimes people assume whoever is reading the guide/writeup will understand everything. I know some people are not too tech sabby and some times fall in the role of IT person, I also know that learning something can be tough when people don't start from the basics and explain things, Sometimes people expect you know as much as they do when they explain something and you end up saying WHA?!?!

My goal

To help anyone who needs help or even get some interesting informative feed back on things I post on here. So the beginners can feel free to learn and the advanced people can feel free to post their experience or what their understand may be.