Fix Your Broken Outlook Personal Folders (PST) File

If you use Outlook and you’ve noticed it being excessively slow or just having errors, you should probably scan and repair your Personal Folders file for any problems. It’s sorta like checkdisk for your email.
Repairing Your PST File
To repair your PST file, you’ll have to open the Scanpst.exe utility that’s included by default with Outlook. The only problem is that there’s no shortcut to it, so you’ll have to find it in the Outlook folder.
Open up explorer and then browse down to the following folder for Outlook 2007:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

Or one of these folders for Outlook 2003 and earlier (thanks to Mike in the comments):

C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033

Once you open up the utility, you’ll have to find the location of your PST file by clicking the Browse button. If you don’t know the location, there are instructions for figuring out the location further down in this article.

Click on the Start button to start the scan…

It will take a while to scan the file, and you’ll get a report at the end telling you whether you have errors in the file.

Click on the Repair button, and after a while you’ll finally get the “Repair complete” message.

If you are curious what was actually repaired during the process, you’ll find a text file in the same directory as your PST file with the same name as the PST file.

Most of the information in the file is pretty cryptic… so I’m not sure reading it will help all that much.

Find Your Outlook PST File Locaton
If you just have a single PST file created automatically by Outlook, there’s a standard location under your user profile directory. Open up an explorer window, and then paste in the following into the address bar:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook

You should see your PST file in the list, usually called Outlook.pst at least in the later versions of Outlook. If you’ve created a new personal folders file, it might be in a different location.
Find Location of Outlook PST in Non-Standard Location
Sometimes your PST file will be in a different location, for a number of reasons.. for instance if you created a second PST you would have been prompted to save it somewhere.
If you can actually open Outlook, right-click on your personal folders location, and then choose Properties.

On the properties screen, click the Advanced button.

Now you’ll see the location of the file in the Filename field. As a bonus, you can also compact the folders from here (although you shouldn’t compact it until it’s repaired first)


It’s well worth it to scan your PST file every so often so you don’t lose data. Of course… you should be backing up your files as well.
Courtesy: HowToGeek

Google Drive: Online Office Suite

Did you know that you store a lot of your personal and official information on a cloud? Where do you think all the attachments in your web mail accounts are stored? However, when it comes to consciously storing data and accessing it, most of us prefer a USB flash drive or, if the data is sizeable, a portable hard disk drive (HDD). Now, Google Drive aims to change this since it is not just a warehouse, but also offers a bunch of applications.

An office suite 

At first glance, Google Drive seems just another storage service; all you see is a series of files that you would want to share. However, when you visit the Google Drive website ( drive.google.com), you will also see a 'create' option, which lets you use Google's online office suite, Google Docs. This allows you to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, drawings, even presentations, providing you with an online office suite. It's almost like having a computer in your browser.

To use Google Drive, all you need is a Google ID. If you have a Gmail account, it will suffice. You can also download the Google Drive app on your computer, be it a PC or a Mac, as well as Android phone and tablet. Though you can create and edit documents through the app on your Android phone, this facility isn't available offline if the app is downloaded on to your computer.

Google Drive offers 5 GB of storage for free. If you need more, you will have to shell out a monthly fee, which starts at $2.49 (Rs 137) a month for 25 GB, and goes up to $800 (Rs 44,000) a month for 16 TB. Upgrading to a paid account will also expand the storage of your Gmail account and Picasa web albums as the storage is shared among these.

Share and sync 

The search feature is very good as you can hunt not just for document names but also terms used in them and, in a neat touch, even for words used in scanned documents. In fact, you can upload PDFs and scanned documents and Google Drive will translate them into Google Docs using optical character recognition. However, this aspect requires some fine-tuning. Google Drive keeps most of Google Docs' sharing options intact. So you can share documents and files from Google Drive either by sending them as attachments or simply by sharing links.

This is where we discovered another impressive feature of Google Drive. If you share a document with someone else, they will be able to view it even if they do not have the software you used to create it. For instance, if you share an image you created using Photoshop, it can be seen by recipients even if they do not have Photoshop. What's more, they will be able to comment on it.

The best part is that all the files you store on your Google Drive will be synchronised automatically across different devices, allowing you to access the same files from different computers, phones and tablets. You can even see live updates of changes made by you or anyone you have shared a file with. All you need is an Internet connection, so you don't have to worry about carrying your pen drive.

 

Is it RIP, thumb drive? 

Does the plethora of sky drives mean that it's time to ditch the traditional thumb drive? If you don't carry loads of data, and your portable needs are less than 5 GB, Google Drive is suitable for you. However, if you have high storage needs, this can prove to be an expensive proposition. Even at the lowest subscription of $2.49 a month, you will end up paying about Rs 1,650 for using 25 GB for a year, which is more than the cost of most 32 GB flash drives. Another problem is that network access is erratic in many places in the country. If you do manage to get hooked up, the speed could be very slow and downloading or uploading large files could take hours. 

A good option is to upload important or frequently used files to Google Drive and store the ones that are rarely used on an HDD. This will save you the effort of having to plug a thumb drive in and out of multiple USB ports in computers. Another advantage is that unlike a thumb drive, cloud storage won't get damaged or become unreadable, which minimises the chances of losing valuable data.

Courtesy: Tech Gig