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Eventually, I tried another approach. I stopped trying to act like an expert and started acting like a regular guy who just happened to face a puzzle.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

The 'expert' trips over his own ego trying to solve a simple problem


July 14, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   Never trust an expert who can't fix his own computer.
   That's what kept going through my mind recently when I was struggling with my main Windows PC. It had been a paragon of reliability for years, but it had started acting up late this spring.
   Nothing I did had any effect on it. Every few minutes, my essential e-mail program got sent to perdition. Outlook 2000, which I use for hours every day, had started to crash so badly that I could barely get my e-mail done.
   I checked and rechecked every one of the programs I run daily. I dutifully reinstalled a half-dozen small programs that usually run in the background, including my Web pop-up-window blocker, my antivirus software and my script blocker.
   I wasted valuable time on Microsoft's Windows Update Site trying to get the inane Windows update program to run for more than a few minutes without crashing. (The problem was on Microsoft's end, not mine. Microsoft needs to take a look at the way both Apple Computer and Mandrake Linux handle automatic updates. The Windows method is unacceptably buggy.)
   I defragged my hard drives. I double checked them for minor errors. I turned my antivirus software off for a spell. I turned off my popup stopper. I turned my computer to face the east. I turned it to face the west. I even turned it to face the northwest, since that's the direction of Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft makes the software that drives us (and our computers) batty.
   Nothing helped.
   I ran the Outlook 2000 installer, directly from the Outlook 2000 CD, and chose the most promising option, one that promised to "repair" the current setup.
   Silly me. It was crash city all over again.
   I tried doing what men are expected to do. I whined a lot. The computer failed to find this amusing.
   Eventually, frustrated beyond all hope, I tried another approach. I stopped trying to act like an expert and started acting like a regular guy who just happened to face a puzzle. It seemed easy enough to figure out: Outlook crashed every few minutes. What was happening every few minutes that would make it crash?
   I turned off the automatic e-mail check. It runs every few minutes. I breathed one of those self-satisfied sighs of relief, closed Outlook, then ran it again. "It's guaranteed to work OK now," I told the cat. He sits on my lap when I do the mail. He looked as forlorn as I did.
   Within a few minutes, Outlook vaporized for the 12,459th time.
   You know the feeling. You're elated because you finally figure out how to solve one of the world's most pressing problems. Then you plummet to earth when your solution turns out to be totally, irremediably wrong.
   Head held low, I looked at the problem again. What could Outlook be doing every few minutes that would cause a crash? Then, in a flash of inspiration, an intelligent idea finally waltzed across my brain. Every five minutes or so my version of Outlook was synchronizing its folders with the mail software on my wife's computer.
   This feature is called Net Folders. It's one of the best things Microsoft ever did. (And it's not in the current version of Outlook, called Outlook XP, because Microsoft wants to make you pay for such synchronization by forcing you to use another method. So I'm sticking with Outlook 2000 for a long, long time.)
   Mail that is waiting to be synchronized is repeatedly polled by Outlook. If the outgoing mail is OK -- if it doesn't have attachments that are too big, for example -- it gets sent out easily. If there's a problem with the mail, it doesn't get sent. If there are BIG problems with individual items, they cause Outlook to ....
   I knew the problem even before I finished thinking about it. Outlook was crashing because one of the items I was trying to share with my wife's e-mail software was corrupted. If I had tried to send it the normal way, by forwarding it directly, Outlook would have choked on that message and I would have seen the problem right away.
   But in Net Folders, everything is done in the background. Outlook didn't tell me it was having a problem with one of the items. It just fell over and died, every time it tried to send the bad item.
   The rest of the story is almost too obvious to tell. I trashed all the waiting mail in the synchronizing folders and Outlook sailed on without any sign of trouble. I had fixed things. I had won.
   I had done it the old fashioned way, one mistake at a time. Sometimes that's all you can do.
   Even when you think you're an expert.