Life :: Constant Work in Progress

This update although doesn’t mention that it improves Outlook’s performance, it will provide a night-and-day difference to those who use Outlook 2007. Install it immediately.

This excellent tip from Windows Networking site.

When you activate Windows XP, Microsoft stores the data in the Windows Product Activation database files wpa.dbl and Wpa.bak in the folder %systemroot%\system32. If you change the motherboard or make significant hardware changes, XP will require you to reactive. But if you plan to reinstall XP on the same hardware, you can back up the activation status and then restore it after you reinstall and avoid the activation process. You can backup the Windows Product Activation database files to diskette. They are very small. A directory listing from my XP Pro workstation:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>dir wp*
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 8447-0571

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\system32

10/24/2001 08:28 PM 12,584 wpa.bak
01/14/2002 09:05 AM 12,642 wpa.dbl

After you reinstall XP, to restore the Windows Product Activation database files:
Start XP to Minimal Safe mode
Change directory to the \%systemroot%\system32 folder
Rename the newly created wpa.dbl to wpa.nonactivated and wpa.bak, if it exists, to wpabak.nonactivated.
Copy your backed up wpa.dbl and wpb.bak files to the system32 folder
Reboot

The user interface for the new Office 2007 beta is VERY nice.  It has a nice clean look as well as much more soothing fonts for rendering.  (the rendering engine is shared with the new Windows Vista)

The new right pane within Outlook that shows your calendar content as well as to-do items is brilliant.  The way Outlook also handles messages that are deleted is very elegant as well.  All in all, I see great possibilities.  This is a refreshing change as the Office 2003 really didn’t improve upon Office XP.

Only problem is that this being a Beta version, it was crashing every 5 minutes.  Eventually I got it removed from my main laptop as it was getting ridiculous.  But once the product is finalized and becomes stable, it appears that I will finally have a nice version of Office for daily use.