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sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

If you’re a road warrior like me, you’ll immediately love the Inspiron M101Z’s size. At a compact 11” x 8” x 1” and weighing in at 3.5lbs, the M101Z is outstandingly portable.  Even my super-light and thin Sony VAIO Z looked kind of big next to it.  I’ve been carrying it around in my Tom Bihn Ego messenger for a few days, and I can honestly say that I barely notice the weight.  My copy of The Girl Who Played with Fire weighs just about as much.

I’m using the baseline version (single-core AMD Athlon II Neo K125 processor, 2GB of RAM, webcam, 3 USB ports, HDMI, media card slot and a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive), and there is a higher-end version that has a dual-core Athlon II K325 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB 7,200rpm hard drive.  Despite the more modest specs, performance with the M101Z was surprisingly good and un-netbookish. Both have the same bright, glossy 1366 x 768 resolution screen, which makes viewing documents and web pages a breeze. The PC was responsive when multi-tasking, and handled my usual barrage of Office 2010 apps (Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote) without any issue.   I didn’t try any games, as a PC with 11.6” screen isn’t really optimal for gaming – unless of course that PC is an Alienware M11X.  I did, however, connect my M101Z to my home media library using Remote Media Streaming, and I was very impressed by the sound quality.  The speakers on the M101Z definitely don’t sound like a usual set of tinny, hollow netbook speakers; I filled up my office with surprisingly rich sound.

Ergonomically, the M101Z was the perfect size for me.  The keyboard is full-size and island style so typing was very easy, and the multi-touch trackpad was responsive and smooth.  As with many Dells, the mouse buttons are soft and pleasantly clickable.  I actually typed the first draft of this post on the M101Z in Windows Live Writer Beta, and I didn’t run into the normal eye-strain or hand-fatigue that I usually get when typing on a traditional netbook. 

My only wish was that the M101Z got better battery life.  Coming off many weeks with the ASUS UL30vt, which I can sometimes stretch to run almost 12 hours, the 4 hours of uptime I got with the Dell was a bit disappointing.  That being said, for most average consumers it should be plenty of time away from the outlet.

As with all of their new PCs, Dell did a great job of making the M101Z look as nice as it performs.  You can get the M101Z in one of 5 colors (mine is bright red) and the internal polycarbonate is high-gloss, so much so that at first glance you’d think it was aluminum.  It’s a beautiful machine that looks and feels like a premium box, even though it is value priced.

If you’re looking for a netbook but are worried about the small screen size and keyboard, I highly recommend you check out an 11-12” machine like the Dell M101Z.  You’ll find it to be a great compromise between the ultra-portability of a netbook and the power of a full-sized PC.

Have a question about this or any other PC?  Post a comment, hit me on Twitter or Ask Ben Anything via email.  Your question might appear in my monthly Ask Ben Anything Q&A column.

In this article I will describe some of the errors, list corrected dates and provide links to files I have prepared with the fixes already in to save you some typing. I have also posted a separate article about adding and removing holidays from your Outlook calendar, rather than making this one even longer with a great big discussion about the mechanics of doing this.

Background

When you add holidays to Outlook, they are read in from a specially formatted text file, formerly outlook.txt, now (since 2002?) renamed to outlook.hol but essentially the same thing. This contains sections for various countries and a couple of religions, so that you can easily choose the ones you are interested in. This approach has a couple of limitations but some upsides too:

• each holiday is specified as a single date, so even things which have on obvious recurrence pattern must be included several times for different years, which means only a limited number are included in the interests of file size
• it is hugely subject to human error, as we will see
• when there are errors, at least you can easily fix them by editing the file or replacing it with one someone else has done (like me)
• you can add extra sections for “countries” you want to include, such as for a special interest group, or additional company holidays (such as winter shutdown periods)

Outlook 2010 errors

The version of the outlook.hol file which shipped with Outlook 2010 final version (RTM) has some serious flaws in it, affecting at least 23 countries as far as I can see (basically most of Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand), and likely many others I have not been able to identify. As I mentioned above, because of the way this file is used, this is relatively easy to fix as it is not an actual bug in the program, but is still very annoying, especially for anybody that has already imported the incorrect holidays.

After much effort, a couple of phone calls and emails and a long-winded web form, I finally managed to log a support call with Microsoft* – not to get a solution (since I could easily fix the problem for my own individual case and share that with my clients as well) but to alert them to the breadth of the problem so they might come up with a hotfix (as they have done before for similar problems) or include an updated file in the next service pack. So far there seems to be some dragging of feet and although they have said they are hoping to get a hotfix out I got bored waiting and thought I might as well share the information I have so that others might benefit.

I have a client with several hundred users in the UK and thousands worldwide who are migrating from Lotus Domino (Notes) to Exchange right now, and I want to be able to work with them to make sure they get a fixed version of the file before users start adding holidays all over the place.

Four main problem areas

I first noticed the problem with the holidays because of some incorrect dates for Easter Monday. I was also adding school holidays to Outlook and realised the Spring bank holiday in 2012 is not the usual last-Monday-in-May. I also spotted that Christmas and Boxing Day always show on the “correct” dates, when I really need to see the Bank Holidays if this is to be useful at all. In the end this got me digging deeper in the file and I found four main classes of problem relating to the UK and many other countries too:

• Incorrect dates for Easter Monday from 2013 to 2019 (or 2020 in some cases)
• No lieu days shown for Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day when they fall on a weekend
• No additional holidays for Scotland (even though there are holidays for Northern Ireland included in the UK)
• UK Spring Bank Holiday is incorrect for 2012 since there is a special case because of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Note: I have only checked the English language version of the file so it is possible that for some of the countries I have identified as having incorrect dates, those dates might be correct in the files that would normally be used in those countries in their native language. The cynical side of my head says that may not be the case…

How to fix the holidays file

There are a few different approaches you can take here, which largely depend on whether you just want a one-off fix for your own machine, or a wider-scale rollout for an entire organisation. You can use a file someone else has already corrected (such as the ones I have created and linked to below) or go in and fix, amend and add to the file yourself.

First let’s look at where the file is and how it is formatted so you can make changes to it if you want to.

Finding the outlook.hol file

The outlook.hol file is shared between all users as it is stored along with your installation of Outlook. This is in:

<program files>\Microsoft Office\Office<version>\<LCID>

The <program files> folder would usually be C:\Program Files\ unless you are running a 32-bit version of Office on a 64-bit version of Windows (quite common now for Office 2010 on Windows 7), in which case you need the one in C:\Program files (x86)\.

The <version> is the internal version number, so 2010 is version 14, 2007 was v12, 2003 is v11 and so on (there’s no unlucky version 13!).

The <LCID> is the “locale ID” associated with the country and language of your installation. There is a list of all Locale IDs Assigned by Microsoft on MSDN which you can use to identify which one you need, but notice that the code used here is for the language of your installation not necessarily proofing tools or anything else you configured – so in the case of most (all?) of the English speaking world, the code you are looking for is 1033 for US English, as that is the language the program runs in, even if you have things like British English spell checking enabled (the .lex files used by proofing tools are not stored in LCID folders, but simply named according to language such as MSSP7ES.LEX for the Spanish spell checking dictionary). There is no installation for British English, Strine or any other variation.

The path on my machine running Office 2010 32 bit edition installed in US English, on a Windows 7 64-bit machine is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\1033

In that folder you will find the Outlook.hol file, which any user can access, but only administrators can modify it. So, the best thing to at this stage is simply to copy it then paste it somewhere else such as your My Documents folder or some temporary directory. This is sensible practice anyway, as you probably want to work on a copy of the file rather than editing the original in situ.

If you create your own version or borrow mine you can use this without putting it anywhere special, although I would recommend replacing the original broken

Structure of the holidays file

The file has a very simple structure, with a section for each country which is named inside square brackets followed by a number indicating how many entries there are for that location. For example:

[Australia] 172
Anzac Day,2009/4/25
Anzac Day,2010/4/25
Anzac Day,2011/4/25
… …

In the built-in file the countries are listed alphabetically, although this makes no difference as Outlook will always present the list in alphabetical order regardless of the way they are arranged in the file. If you want to add an extra country (such as Scotland) or a non-country (for additional company days off perhaps) you can do this anywhere, and the end of the file is probably a good place for these.

Each date entry has the form of a label for the day, a comma than the date in yyyy/m/d format. I have seen documentation claiming that this should be yyyy/mm/dd which is strange since the built-in entries don’t do that, and as far as my tests have shown, you can use either form, but you must use four digit years.

So now you can change any incorrect entries to fix them simply by editing the existing text, but what about adding new dates?

Adding extra holidays

You may want to add some additional dates for your country (that sounds surreally patriotic – “Add a holiday for your country, comrade!”) which is easy enough to do, and you can even paste in whole chunks if you want to, but you must remember to change the number of entries at the top next to the country name accordingly.

If you add lines but don’t increase the number, things will appear to work but when you import the holidays Outlook will simply read the number of lines indicated and stop, so you may miss out loads of holidays you wanted to import. For each of the errors described in detail later in this article I have included the number of holidays listed so if you are using these to edit the file yourself you know what number to add. The section for United Kingdom has 172 to start with, so if you extend the dates for some holidays out to 2035 that adds 3 x 7 = 21, then add the lieu days for Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year (3 x 8 = 24), then add the three corrected dates for May/June 2012 minus the incorrect one, this is a total of +47 = 219 lines total.

If you remove lines for any reason (such as holidays which are not observed across the whole country) and forget to decrease the number, you will get error messages when you try to import, but as far as I can see no damage is done, it simply imports as many as it can and either runs into the next country or the end of the file and stops. If you are editing the file in order for other people to use it you want to make sure you have eliminated any issues like this, so do make sure the number is correct. If you don’t want to see the Battle of the Boyne or St. Patrick’s Day for example you could remove these and decrease the count by 40 (leaving 132 based on the original file, or 179 with my suggested amendments).

Using or sharing your corrected file

Once you have a new version of your holiday file you can simply double click on it to add the holidays from there – you don’t need to put the file in any particular folder or give it a special name. This is fine for a quick one-off but less useful for administrators wanting to help out their whole company’s users. A simple option if you are just distributing a few updates such as additional company dates would be to email the file out to people or put it in a fileshare that users have access to, but this still means that anyone who uses the normal method to add holidays will get the wrong dates too, so you may be better to replace the file on everyone’s machine instead.

The only challenge to getting an updated file out to people is that it needs to replace the existing one, and that is under “Program files” which is not accessible to normal users. If your users are running with local admin rights then you will have no problem with this (although you probably have much bigger problems such as malware to worry about). The easiest solution would normally be to put the file in a share which is available to “authenticated users” to read, and then to include an appropriate line in a machine startup script (applied via group policy most likely) to copy the file down (use xcopy / robocopy so you only copy the file once, not every time the machine starts up). Don’t forget that the file must be called “outlook.hol” for it to be recognised and used by Outlook when users add holidays through the GUI.

If you clone machines as a method of deploying new workstations, make sure the corrected file goes into your “gold” build; if you use other deployment tools or scripts make sure it is included as part of that process.

Note that if Microsoft do issue a service pack, this might overwrite your file with their version (which may or may not be correct), or it might deliberately avoid doing so (this was the case with holiday updates issued for Outlook 2003 for example) and you might miss out on other fixes that you did not know about.

Corrected files and additions available for download

Major fixes

If you don’t particularly want to bother editing the file yourself, I have done most of the hard work for you and fixed all the problems discussed in this article, for all 23 affected countries. I have also extended the dates out to 2035 (for the United Kingdom) for Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year, added Scotland as a country, and thrown in a bonus of dates for System Administrator Appreciation Day (as a separate optional “country” to add).

Download a fixed version of outlook.hol holidays file

Alternative files

Rather than replace the entire file, you might want to just add in the corrected UK dates (and ignore the incorrect ones or manually delete these from your calendar). For this you want the UK additions file which has extra years, lieu days, Scottish holidays and SysAdmin Day (three separate countries so you can add what you want).

There is also a corrected, updated complete version of the dates for the UK mainland only, not Northern Ireland additional holidays.

I have also created a file designed for UK users who also want to be able to add holidays for Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Hungary and Poland without duplication of all the ones which are repeated in all those countries such as Christmas and Easter (yes, I had a specific reason to choose those countries for a client of mine).

Of course, you may not want any of these particular alternatives, but they may give you a useful starting point for ideas and a basis to start copying and pasting from – just remember to make sure the number of entries for a country is correct to avoid any problems.

Outlook 2010 holiday Errors in detail

The errors described briefly above are covered below, including the two different Easter Monday problems, and in most cases I have included my suggested additions if you want to correct your own files, or of course you can simply use my ready-made files with these changes already embedded.

Easter Monday on the same repeated date of 13th April

Despite the obvious rule that Easter Monday is on the day after Easter Sunday this was incorrect in many cases for the UK. This was the correct date for 2009 and will be again in 2020, but the file lists this as the date for 2013 to 2019 as well, despite this not even being a Monday in those years and they got Easter Sunday correct in every case. The fact that they are correct up to 2012 is almost certainly because that was the last year included in the outlook.hol file for Outlook 2007, so someone obviously started from that base and added a bunch of new dates but forgot to change them for each year.

This error is repeated for 6 countries: Andorra, Australia, Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovak Republic and United Kingdom.

The correct dates for Easter Monday from 2013 to 2020 should be those shown below but this is a replacement rather than an addition, so no net difference in number of entries:

Easter Monday,2013/4/1
Easter Monday,2014/4/21
Easter Monday,2015/4/6
Easter Monday,2016/3/28
Easter Monday,2017/4/17
Easter Monday,2018/4/2
Easter Monday,2019/4/22
Easter Monday,2020/4/13

Easter Monday on the same date as Easter Sunday

As if that was not enough, for 17 other countries, for all the years from 2013 to 2020 Easter Monday is shown as the same date as Easter Sunday. Yes, you can have twice as many Easter eggs but you have to go to work on Monday morning! Again, dates up to 2012 are fine.

The 17 countries where this version of the Easter Monday problem exists are: Austria, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand (odd that this has a different issue from Australia, I think), Norway, Poland, San Marino, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland.

The correct dates are the same as those given above.

Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s day falling on weekends

OK, strictly speaking the dates for these don’t change so the file is not incorrect in one sense, but since it is a feature to add holidays to my calendar, it is useless if it does not actually achieve that objective. In the UK when these kind of fixed-date holidays fall on a weekend, we get a day in lieu in the following week to make up for it (so the Monday or as is the case this year, both Monday and  Tuesday as both dates are at the weekend). I know that in some other countries they don’t apply this kind of rule for all holidays (for example in Germany if a Saint’s day is on the weekend you simply miss out), and in others they take the nearer date (ie. Friday for Saturday, Monday for Sunday). Either way these ought to have been included for several countries and they are not.

So, if we leave the original dates in place, the 24 additional holidays as days “in lieu” from 2009 to 2035 would be:

Christmas Day (lieu day),2010/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2011/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2016/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2021/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2022/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2027/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2032/12/27
Christmas Day (lieu day),2033/12/27
Boxing Day (lieu day),2009/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2010/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2015/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2020/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2021/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2026/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2027/12/28
Boxing Day (lieu day),2032/12/28
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2011/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2012/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2017/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2022/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2023/1/2
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2028/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2033/1/3
New Year’s Day (lieu day),2034/1/2

Incidentally, there are probably other holidays which should also have an extra day added in a similar way. Australia Day for example is celebrated on 26th January, but when that is at the weekend it seems to be common practice to have an extra “Australia Day (observance)” in the calendar, but I can’t find a definitive reference to what the rule is (nearest day, following week, or some arbitrary government decision). If you have any specific examples of this kind of thing I’d love to hear from you in the comments, ideally with citations.

No Scottish holidays

There are two main differences for Scottish holidays from the rest of the UK:

• In Scotland they party even harder at New Year, so they need two days to get over it, and when it is a weekend as well they add their usual level of indulgence on top so they also need an extra day in lieu when the 2nd January falls on a weekend
• The August Bank Holiday which is seen by many Brits as signalling the end of summer and the onset of cold wet weather does not make sense in Scotland (I’m not sure if this is because it is always cold and wet up there, or because the change comes earlier), so they have their August holiday on the first Monday of that month rather than the last.

Since Microsoft have managed to include Northern Ireland holidays along with the UK but totally omitted Scotland, I have added Scotland as a country in its own right in my fixed files so you can choose to include these or not, in addition to the rest of the UK. The “2nd January Holiday” is shown on the day it is observed, rather than always on the 2nd (it seemed a bit redundant to label the 2nd January as “2nd January” and then have a lieu day as well). You could of course take this idea further and have a section for all the Scots holidays including those also celebrated south of the border but without any of the Sassenach-only ones such as Late August.

The additional section for Scotland might look like the example below, with 54 entries in total if you include dates up to 2035 as I have done in the downloadable files linked here.

[Scotland] 54
2nd January Holiday,2009/1/2
2nd January Holiday,2010/1/4
2nd January Holiday,2011/1/4
2nd January Holiday,2012/1/3
… …
Summer Bank Holiday,2033/8/1
Summer Bank Holiday,2034/8/7
Summer Bank Holiday,2035/8/6

UK Spring Bank Holiday 2012

In the UK we have two national holidays in May – the May Bank Holiday on the first Monday of the month, and the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday. The outlook.hol file follows this pattern correctly, and this would be fine except for a spanner thrown into the works because of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Firstly we get an extra holiday overlooked by the team at Microsoft on 5th June 2012, and secondly the end of May holiday has been moved to 4th June to act as a “bridging day” and give us a four day weekend. I can forgive people outside the UK for not knowing this (or frankly my dear for not giving a damn). I had no idea until I was looking at school holidays, and from the dozen or so people I mentioned this to since, none had any idea this was happening.

So, we need to add two dates to the holiday file, and I would suggest you should also explicitly include the non-Bank holiday so that it is clear to people who might otherwise assume it is just missed out and add it for themselves and take the wrong day off. In my amended files I have taken out the wrong one and replaced it with the explicit NOT shown below, so the net difference is two additions. The three added dates are:

NOT a Bank Holiday see 4th June,2012/5/28
Spring Bank Holiday,2012/6/4
Queen’s Diamond Jubilee,2012/6/5

Addition information and references

The Bank Holiday dates for the UK and Scotland (for the next few years at least) can be confirmed at the official UK.gov page here: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/LivingintheUK/DG_073741 (=http://tinyurl.com/5kdoa4)

*About that support ticket: because I am an MCT I get two free support tickets with Microsoft. I had to use one of them as the only way I could make them aware of the problem as an official bug report, rather than risk losing it in the noise of the support forums. If I had been a regular customer who would have had to pay to do this I think I might not have bothered.

Before you do though, it is worth noting that Microsoft have published a whole bunch of wrong holiday dates in Outlook 2010 for at least 23 countries, including many future UK Bank Holidays. You should probably read my other post about the errors and download one or more of the files with corrections for them before you go ahead and add anything.

This article is intended to help you add national holidays, remove holidays with an incorrect date, and use Outlook categories to make these stand out on your calendar. Although I wrote this to accompany my post about incorrect dates in 2010 to show you how to actually add or remove these from your calendar, what follows applies pretty much the same to Outlook 2007 and older as well, although to be fair I have not attempted to test this in any step-by-step fashion for Outlook 2003, 2000, 97 or older as I no longer have these antiquated, steam-driven versions installed for me to access.

Adding Holidays to your Outlook 2010 Calendar

The normal way to add these holidays from the outlook.txt or outlook.hol file already installed on your machine is through Outlook’s own options as follows:

In Outlook 2010 go to File > Options then click the Calendar tab on the left, then click then “Add Holidays” button and carry on as described below.

If you are still using an older version, then for Outlook versions up to 2007, go to Tools > Options, then on the Preferences tab click on the “Calendar Options” button, then click on the “Add Holidays” button in the middle of the dialogue box which appears.
Now in either case you will see a list of countries you can add. Tick the boxes for the ones you want, and click OK. If you have previously added any of the countries you chose this time you may see a warning message that this may create duplicate entries. If you previously added the incorrect entries for a country, it is usually better to delete them all first (see below) and then add a correct set instead. If your administrator has provided any specialised versions of the file, you may see unusual “countries” listed, which you can also add in just the same way.

If you try to add the holidays for the same country more than once, you will get a prompt like the one below to check if you really want to do this. If you know you only have a special subset list to add, or you have deleted the ones you already installed, you can safely say yes to this, otherwise say no to avoid any duplication.

What do the holidays look like?

All the holidays you import for the countries you chose will be added with the following characteristics:

• They will be an All-Day Event for the date in question
• The time will be marked as Free (always the default for an All-Day Event)
• They will be in a Category called “Holiday” (see note below)
• The Location will be the name of the country where the holiday applies (we will make use of this later if you need to remove any)
• There is no reminder set for these entries (regardless of your default reminders setting)

What does the “Holiday” category do?

Out of the box, nothing. Outlook has had a feature for many versions which enables you to categorise items according to categories you define and show them in colours you associate with those categories. In Outlook 2010 you can pretty much define as many categories as you want (to the point where they become unmanageable), although in the drop-down list under the “Categorize” button you will only see the fifteen most recently used for that type of information (ie. 15 recently used in your Calendar, Tasks, Mail, Contacts are remembered as separate lists).

Categories are especially useful for Calendar entries as they show up in colour in your Calendar and the To-Do bar. If you add a flag to an email to follow it up, you can easily also add a category to it so the associated colour shows up in the To-Do bar as a visual clue which might remind you why you decided to follow up that item in the first place.

In your Mail or Contacts view the “Categorize” button is on the Home ribbon; in your Calendar you need to select an entry and it will be shown on the additional ribbon which appears (for a meeting or appointment as appropriate). The drop-down menu (shown below in a cut-down form) includes an option for “All Categories”.

When you choose this you can add new categories, rename existing ones and choose different colours to associate with them. So if you simply select an existing one or add one, and name it “Holiday”, Outlook will start showing items already saved using this category in the colour you choose.

As an aside, the same applies if you create a meeting request, categorise it and then send out invitations to your colleagues. The meeting will remember the category you assigned, but this will not change how it shows up in the other person’s calendar. If they do have a category of the same name, or later add one, it will show up in the colour they choose to use for this.

Note: All Day Events and Time Zones

Aside: All-Day Events are intended to take place on a specific date and are NOT “time-zone aware”. For example New Year’s Day is 1st January, it does not start half way through the day even if people around the world start celebrating at different times according to when midnight comes around in their time zone. Normal timed appointments and meetings are shown to a user as taking place at the specified time adjusted for their time zone. This is great for international corporations when sharing and viewing other people’s calendars in order to fix up a time for a remote meeting, telephone call or video conference, as you don’t have to think too hard.

Adding holidays directly from a new Outlook.hol file

The alternative way to add holidays is to start Outlook, then simply find any correctly formatted .hol file (such as the ones linked from my article about the incorrect holiday dates in Outlook 2010) and double click it.

Outlook will then prompt for you to choose a country in the normal way, and you may get a warning about duplicate entries, but if you know the file only contains some specific subset of dates (such as only the lieu dates for Christmas and New Year) then you can go ahead quite safely.

Removing Holidays from your Outlook Calendar

You might need to remove holidays from your Outlook Calendar for various reasons:

• If you still have holidays going way back from previous versions of Outlook you have used
• You have holidays showing for a country you no longer need to see (maybe for a supplier or customer you no longer deal with)
• You added holidays before you realised some of them might have been incorrect
• After adding holidays for multiple countries you have lots of duplicates for dates which are celebrated in many countries (eg. New Year, Christmas, Easter, various Islamic festivals and so on)
• Some of the holidays you added do not apply to you (eg. in the mainland UK you may not be interested in the holidays which only apply in Northern Ireland such as the Battle of the Boyne and St. Patrick’s day)

I have seen various articles in the past which discuss using the categories to search on and identify these, but I find this is not ideal if you have added multiple countries, or when you have also added your own holidays for time off work and used the same category for these dates as well. I would suggest instead using the “location” which you might normally use to show where an appointment or meeting is to take place, such as in a booked room or more generally a particular site, office or even town.

Change your view and sort your calendar entries

So, to start off, in Outlook 2010 open your Calendar and on the View ribbon at the left hand end click on Change View > Events. This will change to a list view with information in columns (rather like a view of email messages), but filtered to show only All Day events, such as holidays. (You could equally choose the more general “List” view and achieve the same goal of seeing things in columns but there will be more entries to go through).

In Outlook 2007 and earlier, you can get to a very similar column format from the View menu > Current view > Appointments.

Once you have your column layout, the first thing to do is sort on “Location” by clicking on that column heading. I would then usually also sort by Subject and by date (this might be labelled “Recurrence Range Start” if you are using the same view I suggested above). To sort on these additional fields, hold down the Shift key while you click on those headings, so you now have everything sorted by Location (eg. all “United Kingdom” together, then by subject (“Christmas Day” all together) then by date, which in most cases will be the year for these annually occurring holidays.

Selecting multiple entries to delete

You should now be able to easily scroll down to find and identify any entries you don’t need, such as duplicates. If you have imported the same holidays twice then you may need to select every second line. To do this use the usual method of holding Ctrl while clicking to select many individual lines before pressing delete to get rid of them. To select a whole block and get rid of them click on the first item then hold Shift and click on the last and you will get a continuous set from one to the other. I would suggest you do this to remove all the holidays for the United Kingdom because you know they include wrong data and you will want to start from scratch before importing a new set of corrected date.

I often import holidays for other countries where I have business relationships so I can easily see that other people are not working, but I don’t need to see things like Christmas and Easter multiple times, so I tend to go and delete all the entries for these which are the same as in the UK. Similarly I tend to delete the Battle of the Boyne and St. Patrick’s day entries which are included for Northern Ireland, but since I am not there I don’t get to take a day off then so I get rid of them. (You can’t miss St. Patrick’s round here anyway for the number of fake Oirish pubs that are bedecked and festooned in green shamrock bunting for two weeks prior to the big day and even bigger night). You might not want to remove holidays for other countries if it is important for you to know if they actually do observe it as a holiday of course.

Don’t forget to switch back to a normal Calendar view when you are done, so in Outlook 2010 go to the View ribbon > Change view > Calendar (in older versions use View > Current view > Day / Week / Month).

Alternative methods

In some countries it can be easier to simply ignore many of the dates provided in the Outlook.hol file and just create your own recurring events. For example in the UK there are Bank Holidays traditionally on the first and last Mondays in May, and the last Monday in August. (except in Scotland, who do it on the first Monday in August instead). This may not be 100% accurate when special cases arise (eg. Spring Bank holiday in 2012 has been moved form May to June – see my post about incorrect entries for more information).

It is also no use for things such as Christmas Day – the date of the Christian festival may be fixed, but the Bank Holiday may be observed on a different date if Christmas itself falls on a weekend. In the UK the rule is always to observe the day on the following Monday (and / or Tuesday if Boxing day also falls on the weekend), and likewise for New Year’s day. However, in other countries they take the Friday in place of a Saturday, and the Monday in place of a Sunday (ie. the nearest day) – I’m fairly sure this is the case in the US for example.

Do you have any special ways you use the features of Outlook for managing holidays? Any workarounds for strange recurrence patterns? Have you had problems in the past or simply never used the feature at all? All comments welcome!

Pro Antispyware 2009, as with almost all other rogue antispyware programs out there, attempts to scare you into purchasing the full blown version by bombarding your computer with fake security popups and scans which state that your computer has a malware or spyware infection and that you need to download and install the program to protect your computer from those threats.

The irony of this is that you absolutely do already have a spyware infection on your computer, but the spyware is Pro Antispyware 2009 itself.

In addition to trying to persuade you to purchase the full, bogus version - Pro Antispyware 2009 will also do a few other things while installed on your computer such as:

- Make your computer perform slower and slower over time
- Download and install additional spyware and malware
- Log your keystrokes and browsing habits
- Send logged information to a remote server

And if you choose to let the rogue program reside on your computer for any length of time, there is a good chance your computer will at some point become so inundated with spyware that it becomes unusable.

Because of all of these reasons, it is crucial that you take the time to remove Pro Antispyware 2009 completely from your computer.

Unfortunately, because the program is highly sophisticated and places random files all over your computer, manual removal is near impossible as you will have no way of knowing whether those random files are legit or not -and there absolutely are random files that are needed for your computer to operate.

Pro Antispyware 2009 has also show to be adept at avoiding detection and removal from a large number of antispyware software that is out there - mainly the tools that are entirely free.

So the only true method for getting rid of this rogue program for good is to invest the small amount of money needed to purchase top of the line spyware removal and protection software.

Now normally you might wince at the thought of actually paying for spyware removal software but it is actually a good thing and here is why - by charging money for their software, vendors are then able to turn around and invest some of that money back into having the necessary dedicated resources to continually monitor for new threats or new variants to old threats and thus are able to provide definition updates for their software on an almost daily basis, and these updates are free. Plus, the high level software typically provides real time protection as well so that threats are blocked at the point of origin before they can ever make it to your computer.

This means a greater level of protection for your computer then if you downloaded a freebie and it never gets updated or only gets updated once a month and with the nature of today's threats, paying a mere $30 or so to fully protect your computer from spyware and adware is a small price to pay.

Here's the bottom line - if you need to get rid of Pro Antispyware 2009 for good and you want to ensure you are protected from online threats moving forward, do yourself a favor and get your hands on top shelf spyware removal software instead of fighting what will become a never ending spyware battle.

Don't let your computer get ruined or risk having your personal information compromised, remove Pro Antispyware 2009 today!

End your Pro Antispyware 2009 frustrations for good by visting Paul's info packed website today, http://www.TheBestSpywareRemovers.com

There you'll discover what the absolute best spyware removal tool is that will not only remove Pro Antispyware 2009 for good, but that will also keep your computer protected from future spyware infections and scams.

See Also : Baby Crib Nursery Bedding Set. Hard Drives Laptops on Sales Canon EF-S 18-200MM Lens review Bypass Firewalls and Proxy Servers

The third and finale concept video in the Microsoft XUI series, “Play”, has now been officially published online by Invivia, the makers of the video. In contrast to the previous “Home” and “Work” videos released over a year ago, it is by far the most bizarre and incoherent of them all.

Although August de los Reyes screened this during his NUI session at TechEd Australia 2010 last week, I thought by looking at it a second time in full fidelity I would have a better understanding of what the hell is going on. That’s not the case.

Fortunately there is an official description that gives some insight into its intended effect.

The XUI series is a poetic exploration of how technology might invisibly integrate into our daily lives.

…

XUI Play, the third video, is a hyper-real portrayal of a dinner party where differing points-of-view create a complex array of conflicting interactions. The physical constraints of dining at a table can hold together conflicting opinions and desires inside of a singular activity. We are using this metaphor of a dinner party as an analog for collaborative computing. This video also investigates the cause and effect of small gestural interactions on an urban scale via the digital cloud. Here, analog devices behave in extraordinary ways with the hidden aid of technology.

Riiiiiight.

On the netbook front, HP introduced a new member to its venerable Mini 210 lineup (the Vivienne Tam – which I love – is part of this line) with new optional HD screens, optional GPS, and the option to power up with the Intel’s new Atom N550 processor.  It’s in a slick new chassis that’s less than an inch thick and weighs just a hair over 3lbs, and you can get one starting at $329.  HP also introduced the Mini 5103, which is HP’s first mini-notebook with a multi-touch screen.  It comes in a beautiful all-metal “espresso” colored case, and its available today starting at $399.  I’m really looking forward to getting a Mini 5103 so I can try out multi-touch.  Overall, HP does a great job with touch – just look at the wildly successful TouchSmart line – and I’m excited to see how they miniaturized the experience for the Mini 5103’s 10.1” screen.

The shiny new Mini 210s

Want something bigger?  HP’s got you covered.  Today they announced the ENVY 17 3D, the first 17” laptop in the world to pump out 3D graphics on a 1080p display.  I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds amazing!  Couple that with monster specs, like an available ATI Radeon 5850 DirectX 11 GPU, 2 terrabytes of storage, an Intel Core i7 processor, and ATI Eyefinity to support multiple external displays, and the ENVY 17 3D is shaping up to be one of the baddest boxes on the market. 

HP rounds out today’s announcement with the ENVY 14 Beats Edition. This is a special edition of the standard ENVY 14 that’s packed with Beats Audio, which HP touts as “A unique, high-performance technology developed by HP and Beats by Dr. Dre™ to provide the optimal sound experience – the way the artist intended it – when playing music or audio through headphones or external speakers.”  I just got one of these laptops into my office and I’ve been playing with Beats Audio and the Beats Audio Solo noise-cancelling headphones and I can attest to how incredible its makes music sound.  Bass is deep, mids are solid, and highs are crisp and clear.  It’s an impressive combo and something that I highly recommend to music lovers.  I’ll be reviewing the ENVY 14 in more depth in the next week or so, so keep an eye out.

It’s always nice to see a leading PC company like HP staying ahead of the game by making cutting-edge technology available in mainstream laptops.  Hopefully we’ll see more PCs with technologies like this coming soon.   Speaking of what’s next – what do you think is the next big thing in PC tech? 

Have a question about this or any other PC?  Post a comment, hit me on Twitter or Ask Ben Anything via email.  Your question might appear in my monthly Ask Ben Anything Q&A column.

You may have heard of the Double Rainbow Video. The guy who filmed this, Paul “Bear” Vasquez, lives in Yosemite and in the past month has gotten huge traffic for his ‘vivid’ reaction to that double rainbow. We hooked up with Bear to learn more about him & show him how to capture a full on double rainbow with Windows Live Photo Gallery using our panorama stitch feature. It’s so intense!

Some more background…

When I first showed the Windows Live team the famous “Double Rainbow” video back in July they thought it was hilarious. But when I said I wanted him to come and do a video with us, they looked at me as if I had been seeing rainbows all day…they thought I was kidding. I e-mailed Bear that night and sure enough, he responded, and with great enthusiasm.

I called him and gave him the lowdown on the project and asked if he would do a “Double Rainbow” redux. He was ecstatic! So we jumped right on it. He flew to Seattle and we had an absolute blast. After a 10 hour shoot we shared stories, ate delicious Vietnamese food (his favorite), and hung out with the crew.

Photo Caption: Bear and our crew. From left to right: Connor Lanman, Max Lanman, Adam Collins, Matt Garrett, Bear, Austin Chick, Michael Fishman, Andrew Sobey, & Shawn Anderson not pictured: Tommy Yacoe & Brendan Schlagel

We did a second video called “Meet Bear” where talks about his experience posting “Double Rainbow” and his love for sharing photos and videos with the world using Windows Live Essentials – video coming soon (will update post when its up). UPDATE: You can check out the second video called “Meet Bear” by clicking here!

Bear is something special. He’s entered the world of social media in hopes to share laughs, smiles, and insights. It’s not about the product, it’s about the people. It’s about the viewers, the users, it’s about you. And more importantly this project also shows how powerful sharing photos and videos can be. If tools like Photo Gallery and Movie Maker didn’t exist, Bear and I wouldn’t have met.

People can now share their lives with everyone and anyone, and can influence each other’s lives in a positive way. That’s what is so cool about Bear’s story.

Till next time,

-Connor

Normally, this bundle costs $49.99. But to knock off a few extra dollars (5%), you can use 4527C939FC7C06 at check out. What? A coupon is a coupon. If you have any problems with the purchase, let me know and I’ll yell at the Appfather for you. I ain’t scared of him.

FCC disclosure: I get a kick back for all my hard work.

Starting October 3 in the U.S., Windows 7 Family Pack will be available for purchase at participating retailers and online at the Microsoft Store.

Purchasing the Windows 7 Family Pack gives you three upgrade licenses of Windows 7 Home Premium for the low price of $149.99. To take advantage of Family Pack, you’ll need a PC running a genuine copy of either Windows Vista or Windows XP that is capable of running Windows 7. The Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor can tell you which features and editions of Windows 7 will run on your computer(s).

For those of you who don’t live in the U.S., Family Pack may be coming your way too. It goes on sale in Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia and many other markets on or after Oct. 22 (Windows 7’s 1 year anniversary!)

Read more here

Microsoft introduced the Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack Upgrade for 3 PC's last year for a limited time while stock's last. It was a major hit among consumers who wanted to upgrade multiple PC's in their homes at an economically sound price. For months after it was discontinued, persons kept asking on the Microsoft Answer's Forum, 'How can I get it?'. Well, its here now, which makes it a great opportunity grab a license for those PC's still running older versions of Windows.

Users should note that Windows 7 Home Premium Premium Family Pack Upgrade for PC's is an upgrade license. This means, you need to install it on a computer running a previous version of Windows such as Windows XP or Windows Vista and they must be activated. All three licenses must be installed within the same household. Its a great deal for an awesome OS!

• PowerShell 2.0,
• PowerGUI (including all Pro features!),
• Active Directory scripting, and even
• Non-Windows scripting with PowerShell.

This is a great hands-on training which you can order to help IT professionals in your company get up to speed with PowerShell and these popular PowerShell tools so they can get the most out of the technology available to them.

The training is available in North America, Europe and Asia, in English, Japanese, French and Spanish.

Go to the LeadThem Consulting PowerShell training page to learn the details on the topics covered, and sign up for the training. PowerShell skills you get from a training like that make a great return on investment!

It will be focused on Crystal Reports 2008 and will cover:

Overview – what is Crystal Reports?

How to use Crystal Reports

Features and benefits

Product demonstration

Q&A

It’s at 15:00 tomorrow (Thursday 2nd September) and you can register here:

http://bechtlesap.eventbrite.com/

See you there!

Cheers

Rich

For those of you who don’t live in the U.S., Family Pack may be coming your way too. It goes on sale in Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia and many other markets on or after Oct. 22 (Windows 7’s 1 year anniversary!)

According to IDC’s Consumerscape 360 data, there are 2.1 PCs per household in the U.S., but, as we all know, networking isn’t easy. Windows 7 has built in features – like HomeGroup- that make it easy and quick to get all of your home PCs connected and sharing files, music, photos and printers.

So, don’t delay. The Windows 7 Family Pack will be available soon while supplies last.

If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on Twitter.

µTorrent is a small and incredibly popular BitTorrent client.

Micro-Sized Yet Feature Filled

Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Additionally, µTorrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification (compatible with Azureus 2.4.0.0 and above, BitComet 0.63 and above) and peer exchange.

Resource-Friendly

µTorrent was written with efficiency in mind. Unlike many torrent clients, it does not hog valuable system resources – typically using less than 6MB of memory, allowing you to use the computer as if it weren’t there at all. Additionally, the program itself is contained within a single executable less than 220 KB in size.

Skinnable and Localized

Various icon, toolbar graphic and status icon replacements are available, and creating your own is very simple. µTorrent also has support for localization, and with a language file present, will automatically switch to your system language. If your language isn’t available, you can easily add your own, or edit other existing translations to improve them!

Actively Developed and Improved

The developer puts in a lot of time working on features and making things more user-friendly. Releases only come out when they’re ready, with no schedule pressures, so the few bugs that appear are quickly addressed and fixed.

Changelog:

• Fix: fixed DLL hijack exploit
• Change: add bold text for Ask toolbar offer
• Fix: added groupbox in bandwidth settings
• Fix: Fixed size of static text in transfer cap setting pane to be translatable
• Fix: Fixed peer exchange exploit
• Fix: Safari 5 compatibility for WebUI
• Fix: WebUI security improvements

Download: µTorrent 2.0.4 Build 21431 | 320 KB (Freeware)
View: µTorrent Webite

All the codecs you need for Windows 7 to play AVIs, DVDs and more!

It does not contain a media player and it does not associate file-types. With the Windows 7 codec package installed you will be able to use any media player, limited only by the players’ capabilities, to play all movies and video clips. Streaming video is supported in several formats in all popular web browsers. Users of the Windows 7 media center codecs have the ability to choose what is installed and where to install it using the public redistributable. After installation you can select to remove specific portions without removing the entire package. You can also re-add the removed items at any time.

Download: Windows 7 Codecs 2.6.2 Bottom of page | 23.6 MB (Freeware)
View: Windows 7 Codecs Website

Orbit Downloader is a download manager which is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/streaming media from Myspace, YouTube, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare, support RTMP. And to make general downloading easier and faster.

Orbit Downloader is written with efficiency in mind, it typically uses less than 3MB of memory and 3% of cpu when downloading.

What’s new:

• Fix: Orbit addon for Firefox

News source: Official website
Download: Orbit Downloader 4.0.0.3