Here is a really useful, and free, utility that displays the temporary MS Outlook email attachments stored in your PC’s local OLK cache.  I found myself needing this utility after working late last night and making the school boy error of working on a MS Word document directly from an email attachment and then closing it without saving it to a directory on my hard disk.  When I had realised what I had done and went to open the Word document from within the attachment it unsurprisingly had reverted back to the original version with no sign of my last 60 minutes worth of updates to be seen.  Doh!

I knew about the temporary OLK directory that contains the temporary files for the MS Outlook attachments though this can be quite a chore to try and search through it to find the required file.  This is when I called on the services of the ‘OLK Finder’ utility.  Within seconds of running this useful utility it presented a list of my OLK based temporary files without having to rummage through the temporary internet files directories – check out the long ‘OLK Location’ field in the screen shot below.

I definitely recommend adding ‘OLK Finder’  to your IT toolbox and the fact that is free makes it a great addition.  It doesn’t require to be installed on your PC so is suited to a USB key for convenience.

Something that caught me out recently was trying to bring up system information about my Windows Server 2008 machine.  I have in the past always typed ‘winmsd’ and a box would appear with a pretty decent amount of information on the system from which I ran the command from.

Though trying this old faithful of a command from my Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 (and I believe the same is true for Windows Vista) machines led to nothing happening and no useful system info window opening.  Now this is probably something that I have missed over the last year or so but ‘winmsd’ has now been replaced with a new command called ‘msinfo32’. (Amendment: @wilva has kindly informed me that ‘msinfo32’ has been around since NT4 days – thanks ) So if you run this command from either a 32 or 64 bit version of Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 you get the familiar ‘System Information’ screen and details you used to get by running ‘winmsd’.

Maybe I could have run the ‘msinfo32’ command all along (see amendment above) but I thought I’d throw it out there in case there are some fellow ‘winmsd’ die hards out there like myself. 

For more information (credit to @wilva) check out this Wikipedia entry on Microsoft Diagnostics.