Shortly after 2010 began, my work laptop died. After my minor (ok, it really was rather major) panic attack, I started think about how this was going to impact my daily life. I have an old Dell laptop that I’m working off of at home – mainly for internet surfing and e-mail checking and I’m now using a Dell Desktop in my classroom.
Recently, Dell sent my work laptop back from Depot Service. While it appears to have fixed some of the issues that it had (the fan, power supply, and LCD screen were replaced), the Windows install is messed up. I was about halfway through a repair install of Windows when it died so now it gets stuck there for some reason. I’m at the point where I’m probably just going to wipe the entire thing and start over.
The laptop I ordered for myself, the HP Envy,
still has not arrived. It’s currently in
That is very frustrating for me because I can literally reach out and touch Linwood from Wilmington. Well at least I think I can. I don’t actually know where it is but given how close PA and Delaware are to each other it can’t be that far, right?
Anyway.
Back to how my recent epic failure with my laptop impacted my daily life.
I have a lot of files and resources that I need to access from home AND at work. This wasn’t a big deal prior to the death of my laptop because I took it back and forth. All 17 inches of it. It was quite heavy but this really had been the easiest way for me to deal with everything. I had my e-mail in Outlook, lessons plans in OneNote, pictures in Lightroom, and assorted other resources.
My first priority was getting my e-mail set up again in Outlook 2007. I like to use Outlook for all of my e-mail as I’m not a fan most webmail interfaces. However, if you aren’t set up to use Microsoft Exchange (we aren’t) this means that your e-mail is stuck on one computer if you pull it off of the server. I wanted to find a way to be able to get to the work e-mail I had pulled off the server without taking a laptop back and forth.
Outlook has something called a PST file. If you want to learn more about that go here. Essentially this means that all of your Outlook data – contacts, e-mails, calendar info., etc… is inside this one file. This brings my to an online tool I’m using to help me have access to that content…
Windows Live Mesh
I’ve used Mesh for over a year now. With Mesh, you install software that essentially runs in the background of your computer. It looks like a little blue ball and sits in your system tray (the area typically by your clock).
Mesh enables you to synch your files between all of your devices (multiple computers – desktops and/or laptops and phones with web access).
Mesh also enables you to remotely access other computers in your Mesh (assuming they are on of course). By using the Live Mesh Remote Desktop, you can get to all your files and folders on those other computers and even use software that is on those computers but not on the one you are currently using. I haven’t had a chance to try that yet but it sounds super cool.
I have Mesh running on all of my computers and have added my Outlook PST file to my Mesh as well. This means that if I needed to access my Work Outlook content from home all I need to do is open up that PST file and poof! My Outlook at home is then loaded up with all of my Work content. I wish it synched simultaneously but this works for now. I’ve used Mesh to synch my OneNote files quite effectively as well but I’ll talk about that in another post.
