Defrag Your Hard Drive

I returned off of vacation to find that my scheduled task for defragging my hard drive was failing on my machine. Come to find out, the defragging process had not been started for over three weeks. Scratching my head, I went to investigate why. Well, right before I went on vacation, I was prompted to change my Windows password (The company I work for has a 90-day change password policy). So, I changed it and thought nothing of it. As you know, in order to run a successful scheduled task for defragging, you must provide a username and password. If you change your Windows password, you must change your password for your defrag scheduled task as well. If you don't, your "Last Run Result" will display a FAIL!!!

Lesson learned: If you have a company password change policy, ensure you update you defrag password as well.

Magic Jack and Me...

I ordered Magic Jack a few months ago in order to get a cheaper rate for home-phone service. I originally had Skype but, their setup was a bit too much; if you did not want to be tethered to your computer. I heard that a person would be able to hook up a base unit with other extended phones with just one phone line. Needless to say, it worked out well; for a while.

I had (have) an old desktop that I was not using and decided to use it as a dedicated Magic Jack machine to route all of my calls through. I proceeded to put my old desktop on my existing network and access it via Remote Desktop.

One day, I decided I needed to access the old desktop Remotely while trying to setup my fax machine on the box as well. Well, low and behold, my Magic Jack was not working properly; meaning, I got a dial-tone but could not call out.

It took me a while to figure out the problem. Once I found out that in order for Magic Jack to continue working properly, I would not be able to access it Remotely while using the local resources on the box I was Remoting from. Once I changed the options to use it's own local resources, everything worked!

I'm guessing that the Magic Jack needs to use the local resources when Remoting in order to produce sound correctly.