2008 May

Passwords, Password Lists and Keeping Passwords Secure

May 30, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

I’m often asked about how I handle passwords for all the different sites that require passwords.

The questioner’s eyes get pretty big when I mention that I use random mixtures of letters and numbers for my passwords, and even bigger when I say that I use a different password on every site.

The immediate question is “How can you keep track of them all?”

The answer is one of the reasons that I use a PDA, a Personal Digital Assistant. In my case, it is the PalmOS v4 based Sony Clié SJ-33, which I’ve used for a couple years.

The program that lets me keep track of these is called Secret! (yes, there’s an exclamation mark as part of the name). Secret! has long been available for PalmOS. I didn’t realize it, but it is also available for Pocket PC handhelds, too. According to the publisher’s web site (http://linkesoft.com/secret/index.html), Secret! runs on all Pocket PC handhelds with Windows Mobile 2003, 2003 SE, and the current Windows Mobile 5.0.

Secret! uses the 128-bit International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA) encryption system to keep the data protected. Of course, it requires a password to get into Secret!

What happens if my PDA breaks?

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Filed Under: Security, Terry's Computer Tips

Outlook Express – Problem Compacting Email Folders

May 26, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

I received an email recently from a reader who was having problems with Outlook Express. As I have written several times recently, when you delete emails, they’re not really deleted — even if you “empty the deleted emails folder.” Your email program still has the email in its data file — it has only marked the email as deleted. The next time you compact the email folders, the folder would be rewritten without the deleted email. Yury, though, was having difficulties compacting one of his email folders:

Terry,

I can not compact my Sent folder. By the end of the compacting process I am getting an error message “The folder is currently in use by Outlook Express or another application”. After closing the message the whole computer slows down, and some times I have to reboot it. I have an impression, that something is running in the background. Also, lately when I am trying to back up my e-mail on the external drive, the process running continuously 2 or 3 times and volume is in gigabytes. It all indicates, that I have old unerased messages sitting somewhere in my computer. As a result, I have problems sending e-mails. The e-mail seemingly does not leave Outbox, but in fact Outlook keeps continuously send it out, and the e-mail never shows-up in the Send folder. I had this problem before, and it always because there are to many unerased e-mails in my system. Except before I was able easily to fix it by deleting and compacting files.

Please, advise. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Yury Ferkelman

I wrote back to Yury to tell him how to proceed:

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Filed Under: Email, Outlook Express, Terry's Computer Tips

HOWTO: Identifying and Changing Default File Type / Program Associations

May 12, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

If you need to identify which program opens a particular file type, you can do that, and a lot more, using the Folder Options functions in Windows Explorer.

To find Folder Options, open Windows Explorer (right-click on Start, select Explore). Then, on its menu bar, select Tools and then Folder Options…

At this point, we need to select the File Types tab.

On the File Types tab, we see a large, scrollable box that lists file types. As we scroll down the list, we see various file extensions (such as JPG and DOC) along with a text description of the file type.

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Filed Under: File system repair, Performance Tweaks, Software, System, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Vista, Windows XP