Have you ever pressed the send button in Outlook, only to suddenly realise that you forgot to add the attachment, or that you are sending it to the wrong person?

Both Outlook 2003 and 2007 have a feature, where you can attempt to recall a message, effectively unsending the email message. This has got me out of trouble in the past. It is nice to be able to add in that after thought, or to remove that risky remark.

A recalled message is invisible on the recipients computer, as long as the recall takes place before the email has been downloaded onto their computer.

This recall feature is not totally reliable. Much depends on how quickly you send the recall message. However, there is no harm in giving this a try when it is needed.

To try it out, open up your sent items folder and double click on an email message. The email will open up in a new window. In Outlook 2003, Click on the actions menu. In Outlook 2007, click Other Actions. Finally, select Recall this message. It’s that simple.

There are so many ways to control the movement between slides in PowerPoint. We can use the Enter key, our mouse or touch pad (to click or scroll), or we can use the arrow keys on our keyboard. I prefer to use the arrow keys as they a reliable, and if you make a mistake by skipping a slide, you can easily press the left arrow to backtrack.

The method I see people use most often is to click using either a mouse or a touch pad. This is an obvious choice for many as the buttons are big and easy to find. The only problem with this method, is that if you skip a slide, it is natural to try a right click to backtrack. Instead of PowerPoint moving back one slide, you get an ugly context menu as shown above. Not only is this menu fairly useless, it is distracting, and it destroys the flow of the presentation. I see this context menu show up in so many presentations. It is a gripe of mine so I looked to see if it was possible to make the right click step back.

Both PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 have the option to disable the context menu. You can change a setting to make your right click move the presentation back one slide.

Go into your PowerPoint settings.
If you are using PowerPoint 2003, look in the view tab
If you are using PowerPoint 2007, click on advanced
Untick “Show menu on right mouse click”

I don’t know why this isn’t the default setting.

If you make a complaint to your phone company, you may end up feeling that speaking to customer support is getting you nowhere, and that you are out of options.

What do you do now? There is one more step you can take which not many people know about. Most phone companies find it hard to find new customers and it is very important for them to hold onto existing customers. They will do a lot to keep you with them. That is where retentions come in.

Ask your customer support if you can speak with their retentions staff. Retentions is a seemingly small team of people that have more authority than the general customer support staff. They may not be able to help you with your problem directly, but if they feel that you have a case, they are able to offer you credit, refunds or services to keep you on board.

You will obviously get a bit further if you tell them that you plan to end your business with them, or if your contract is coming to an end. I have had some success with this from previous problems.

If they don’t want to help you, moving on is often the best way to go. You will probably get a better deal elsewhere as plans are constantly changing and offering more for your money as technology grows.

Often the first piece of hardware to cause us grief on a computer is the internal case fan. These fans can give off a really nasty grinding sound after a couple of years, normally due to dust buildup in the inner workings of the fan. Rather then replacing the fan, we can initially try to dislodge the dust.

Dust is less likely to effect the CPU and video card fans because these fans are usually of higher quality and they don’t have the same access to external dust. I would not try this method for these fans as it is likely to do more harm than good.

As a precaution, it is sensible to either remove the fan from the case or to remove the hard drives from the computer. We don’t want any vibrations resulting in this method to cause your hard drive grief. I say this as a disclaimer, but I have never had any problems bypassing this step.

Find yourself a screwdriver, pull the cover off your case and turn on your computer. Hold your PC case steady and strike the sticker on the fan with the butt of the screwdriver. Start with very gentle strikes and work your way up. You should not need to strike very hard to clear out the dust.

I have used this method on numerous occasions and had great success. The worst case is that you break the fan, that you were likely going to replace in any case. If you can be bothered, now would be a good time to vacuum the inside of the machine whilst the cover is off.

It’s primitive, but it works a dream.

I started my new job this week and it is all going all right. Being a University, the technology is generally fairly new, and the software is up to date. They have recently installed the largest Wi-Fi network in Australia and are running the largest Active Directory network in the southern hemisphere.

There is only one thing that is getting to me, and that is a Web Browser without tabs. Internet Explorer 6 is still on every machine around the workplace. I assume this is due to some incompatibility issues with a couple of corporate applications.

Over the last couple of years, I have been using tabbed browsers. I did not find it hard to adjust, and could see the benefits very quickly. It has now been a year since I have touched a browser without tabs and am finding it a lot of hard work. I find that my screen is full of windows without any flow or connection to each other. It has slowed down my browsing substantially. Needless to say, I upgraded the first chance I had so now I am back into tabbed bliss. I am no longer hesitant to open a bundle of links at once. I didn’t realise how big a deal it was until I started here.

Tabbed browsing has many advantages over conventional windows.

• It’s much quicker to open a new tab than a new window
• Less system resources are used
• Web-pages in a window relate to each other better
• A modern operating system will display pages better than older browsers
• IMG looks like crap in older browsers

If you have the means to upgrade your browser to the latest Internet Explorer or Firefox browser (doesn’t matter), you too can enjoy the beauty of tabbed browsing. It is a very quick and easy install for both. Most readers of Inspect My Gadget made the move a long time ago.

If I can encourage one reader to upgrade their browser to a tabbed browser I will feel like this article was worthwhile, and not just an excuse for a post on a slow news day.