2009 December | Making Windows Easy - All Things Microsoft, Software, and the Web

Archive for December, 2009

Last Updated on Sunday, 27 December 2009 06:55 Written by Alan Monday, 28 December 2009 08:00

Everyone who has a Gmail account has duplicate contacts. It’s inevitable. You email someone’s home address and then their work address and they show up as separate listings. It used to be you’d have to go go through your contacts one by one and fix these. But, recently, Google released an update to Gmail that takes care of this for you.

1. Sign-in to your Gmail account and click Contacts and on the right click the Find Duplicates button.

2. You now will see a list of you duplicates. You click Details to view specific information on each. Then, simply click Merge and you’re done.

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

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Software Updates 12/19/09-12/26/09

Last Updated on Saturday, 26 December 2009 09:15 Written by Alan Sunday, 27 December 2009 03:00

SyncBackSE 5.8.7.23 available HERE

CCleaner 2.27.1070 avilable HERE

Vista Codec Package 5.5 available HERE

Alan

Alan is the owner and editor of Making Windows Easy. In addition to writing about technology he is also an avid distance runner and hiker. Read More

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Trusting Microsoft SkyDrive?

Last Updated on Saturday, 26 December 2009 02:03 Written by Alan Sunday, 27 December 2009 08:00

Recently we posted an article (HERE) on how to set up a Windows SkyDrive account. Since they offer 25gb of storage for free I thought it was a great place to use for off-site storage of my photos. Thankfully, it was not my only copy of anything.

It began as I was uploading a new folder of pictures to a folder titled 2009, which contained a bunch of sub-folders of pictures from this year. The upload stalled and when I went to start it over I noticed the entire 2009 folder was gone from my SkyDrive. I exited and returned, but the folder was still missing.

My first step then was to Google the problem, but I found no one else with a similar issue. The next step was to email the SkyDrive team (the make this address surprisingly hard to find, but I guess you get what you pay for. I sent my first email on October 17 and received response number one the next day. It asked several questions, many of which I had answered in my original email, but none-the-less, I gave the info again. Over the course of the next couple of weeks I received several more emails from the SkyDrive team, frustratingly each and every one was from a different person.

Sporadic correspondence continued through October and November. Then on December 14 I received the following:

—

Hi Alan,

I apologize on behalf of Microsoft for your frustration and inconvenience as well as the length of your engagement with support. I have been in contact with the SkyDrive product team and the SkyDrive operations team concerning your missing folder “2009″. Both teams have reported to me that they are unable to locate your folder in the system and there is no trace of its previous existence which rules out any restoration from any backup method. At this point, unfortunately, there is nothing more I can do to return your data to you. I apologize for the frustration an answer like this surely causes. My only suggestion to you now would be to create the folder again and upload the files (which you hopefully still have) into the folder. I would also offer a bit of advice; I would not rely on SkyDrive as a back up mechanism for files on your pc. It is designed to be a method to share files rather than back them up, so hopefully you were not relying on SkyDrive as a backup solution.

Thank you for you patience and understanding,

Dan

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I know I get no sympathy from the Sidekick owners out there, but I wanted to let everyone know that that was not the only case of Microsoft losing data, and in this case, it’s not going to be recovered. So, soon I will be writing a review of my new online home for photos – PicasaWeb.