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Finally, a use for Internet Explorer!

So, to cut a long story short, due to my employers’ “interesting” IT policies, I’ve ended up providing my own computer, which can only be connected to the guest wi-fi, not the real network. However, I would still like to access my work e-mail, which is kept in MS Exchange.

Enter “Outlook Web Access”. Now normally this isn’t a great deal of fun to use: the interface is clunky, and it doesn’t even refresh itself to show new messages as they arrive. But this is because you are limited to the “Light” version when viewing it with any browser other than IE.

Load the full version in Internet Explorer, and by some Microsoft magic, it is almost identical to the standalone version of Outlook inside a web browser container! You can even right click things and they do what you expect.

So, that makes two neat pieces of engineering from Microsoft that made my day. The other one was Windows 7.

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Windows command of the week: “netsh winsock reset”

I discovered this fascinating command when trying to fix Kat’s computer.

Originally it showed a completely empty desktop with no icons or taskbar, just the wallpaper, even in so-called “Safe Mode”. A rollback to the last known good configuration solved this, but the networking still wouldn’t work. The DNS resolved domain names as garbage, some even containing bell characters that made the machine beep.

I tried uninstalling the driver for the network card and rebooting, at which point the DNS just stopped working altogether. The “ipconfig /renew all” command failed saying that “No adapter is in the state permissible for this operation”.

A quick Google search for this error message (using my handy palmtop that happened to work with Kat’s wi-fi) turned up a MSDN article that basically said: “Shit happens, type ‘netsh winsock reset’ and reboot”

And what do you know, it worked 🙂