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July 12, 2005

Rats!

Oh, I know you don't want to hear about this, but I've had a terrible time with my computer. Yesterday morning, we got hit with a power outage. When the power came back on about three hours later, I turned my computer back on. One of my e-mail messages had gotten corrupted when the computer had shut down, and my e-mail program (Outlook Express) was frozen and wouldn't work at all. All my messages were there, but I couldn't read them, delete them, or get any new messages. I worked on it for a couple of hours and was finally able to rename and move my entire inbox to a new folder. By doing that, I could receive and send new e-mail, but I couldn't get to the old messages, some of which I desperately needed.

A $35 call to Microsoft didn't help any. The Microsoft tech that I talked to was amazed I was able to move the message folder and wanted to know how I did it. I didn't bother to tell her -- all I wanted to know was how to be able to access the messages. After an hour on the phone with her, I gave up. She wanted me to delete the entire folder with all the old messages and I refused. I thought I could figure out a way to get all those messages back. But of course I didn't realize that it would take the rest of the day.

I tried a few demo "fix it" programs that didn't work. I made a change to the registry, which I've done to fix similar problems in the past, but that didn't work either. Then -- a brilliant idea! I thought maybe I could import all my messages into Outlook. Except -- somehow I managed to blitz Outlook from my machine when I made the registry change. So then I had to reinstall Outlook, another time-waster. But once reinstalled, it let me import all my Outlook Express messages, including my old inbox. Then I exported the old inbox back into Outlook Express. Success -- almost! Every message was duplicated three or four times, giving me an inbox of some 6,000 messages. So I spent the rest of the day deleting the duplicates.

Some fun. Now what I want to know is why Microsoft couldn't come up with that solution. They could have saved me hours and hours of work. And since both Outlook and Outlook Express are Microsoft products, you'd think they could figure it out. But no....

So now I have all my messages back in my inbox. But I'm exhausted.

Posted by Deborah at July 12, 2005 06:13 AM





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