Disabling Word as Outlook's email editor

By default, Microsoft Outlook uses Word to edit email messages. This is a nice feature because it offers enhanced editing capabilities over the basic email editor. However, if you are using an under-powered machine like I had at my last employer, you really want to cut down on memory usage and don’t want Word running just so you can send a quick email. When this is the case, you can stop Outlook from using Word to edit emails, by opening Tools -> Options, clicking the “Mail Format” tab, and deselecting the option “Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages”.

This isn’t a revolutionary tip, but it’s something that I hadn’t thought to look for and would have been very useful when I was stuck on an old machine.

Formatting my MP3 player

My current MP3 player is a SanDisk Sansa c250. It’s not a fancy as some of the more expensive units, but overall it’s very nice unit for the price. Recently I needed to transfer 1GB of data between to pc’s and didn’t have a flash drive handy; so I just copied the data to my Sansa and used it for the transfer. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I tried to delete the data from the MP3 player, I was faced the the error message “Folder cannot be deleted because it is protected.”. After some experimenting, it looks like the Sansa will not let you delete a folder if it contains data. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that the data I had transferred contained hundreds of folders. There was no way I was going to dig through all of these folders to delete the files. Being a developer, I decided to automate the process and write a .NET application that would traverse the folder structure of the unit, and delete all of the files.

I threw together a quick app, tested it on some other folders, and was off to the races (or so I thought). I attempted to select the folder on the device (using the .NET FolderBrowserDialog), and Windows Vista gave me the error message “The folder cannot be used”.

I had never tried to access a portable device programmatically, so I wasn’t sure what the cause might be. Google’ing didn’t help. Next, I did some debugging to find out what the referenced file path was so I could just hard code it. The path turned out to be in Temporary Internet Files. I’m not quite sure what this means, but obviously Windows doesn’t treat this device like a normal drive.

It was time to take a step back and think about what I was trying to accomplish. I wanted everything deleted from the device, except for my music. But, all my MP3’s are backed up on several devices. I took a quick look at the options on the Sansa, and it turns on there was a format device. This quickly wiped out everything, and then I simply copied the music back to the device.

I guess sometimes, it pays to approach a problem from a different perspective.