Outlook has detected a major hardware change?

[eselk]

A while back I replaced the motherboard and most of the other hardware
in my PC, but not the harddrive. All of my other programs worked fine,
but the first time I ran Outlook it told me that it had detected a
major hardware change. I don't remember the exact message, it was
quite wordy, and I pretty much just clicked the OK button to get passed
it (I know, not a great idea).

Anyway, I ended up having to hard reset my Pocket PC device to get it
working again, and I also lost a bunch of messages from my inbox (in
Outlook). Part of my job is to avoid these type of problems for our
customers, so I'd really like to figure out how to recreate this mess
so I can figure out what went wrong. However, I'd like to do this
without having to replace my hardware again.

Has anyone ever seen this "Outlook has detected major hardware
changes..." message? Does anyone know what specificly it is looking
for? Could I just replace my network card maybe, or is it looking at a
serial number for the CPU or motherboard, or something else? I don't
think it can be related to any registry settings, or the harddrive (or
anything stored in the HD), because I didn't replace that.

Also, it was weird that my Pocket PC device also stopped working (at
least most of the features of it, like Speed Dial). Almost like it
detected Outlook wasn't working anymore, so it decided to die also.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

What version of outlook and did you need to reactivate?

Outlook (and office and windows) loses activation if my change more than
4 -6 pieces of hardware. Exactly how many depends on the hardware and your
configuration. mobo, cpu, network card, hard drive, and amount of ram are
among the things it looks for.

AFAIK, you can't really repro it without changing hardware. In all honesty,
only a small percentage of people run into this.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/

 

[eselk]

Outlook 2002, and yes, I did have to reactivate. Can you tell me what
the registry settings are that I would need to delete in order to get
this message to come back again, without actually changing 4-6 pieces
of hardware? I imagine that maybe you can't, because they are probably
related to copy-protection. In my case I just want to recreate the
error message so that I can attempt to figure out why I had to
hard-reset my Pocket PC device, and why I lost some of my Outlook data.

I'm pretty sure it is related to this error, because the very first
problem was that ActiveSync was reporting "error saving record" (I
don't have the actual error anymore, should have saved it). I tried to
sync a few times and it just kept giving me the same error. So I tried
to run Outlook, and that is when Outlook gave me this message. I think
Outlook gets in some state where MAPI or OLE calls (whatever ActiveSync
uses) fail, and they fail in such a way that I lose some data
(ActiveSync maybe detects records as deleted, and removes them).

Since this state doesn't occur very often, I doubt Microsoft tested it
very well with all of these combinations (I don't fault them for that,
I understand testing). So I'm hoping I can figure out a way to
recreate this state very quickly so that I can do my own testing.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

delete the data file and a reg key to reset it -
http://www.outlook-tips.net/archives/2003/20031027.htm

I think 2002 has this key (use 10 instead of 11)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Registration
subkeys for each separate 2002 installation (office has one for all apps
installed in the suite) - find the one for your installation of outlook and
delete or rename.

I would save the reg key and the dat file so you can restore activation
without calling in and risk wasting your activations.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

BTW - you only need to delete/rename the two productid keys, not all of the
contents of the subkey.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/

delete the data file and a reg key to reset it -
http://www.outlook-tips.net/archives/2003/20031027.htm

I think 2002 has this key (use 10 instead of 11)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Registration
subkeys for each separate 2002 installation (office has one for all apps
installed in the suite) - find the one for your installation of outlook
and delete or rename.

I would save the reg key and the dat file so you can restore activation
without calling in and risk wasting your activations.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/

Outlook 2002, and yes, I did have to reactivate. Can you tell me what
the registry settings are that I would need to delete in order to get
this message to come back again, without actually changing 4-6 pieces
of hardware? I imagine that maybe you can't, because they are probably
related to copy-protection. In my case I just want to recreate the
error message so that I can attempt to figure out why I had to
hard-reset my Pocket PC device, and why I lost some of my Outlook data.

I'm pretty sure it is related to this error, because the very first
problem was that ActiveSync was reporting "error saving record" (I
don't have the actual error anymore, should have saved it). I tried to
sync a few times and it just kept giving me the same error. So I tried
to run Outlook, and that is when Outlook gave me this message. I think
Outlook gets in some state where MAPI or OLE calls (whatever ActiveSync
uses) fail, and they fail in such a way that I lose some data
(ActiveSync maybe detects records as deleted, and removes them).

Since this state doesn't occur very often, I doubt Microsoft tested it
very well with all of these combinations (I don't fault them for that,
I understand testing). So I'm hoping I can figure out a way to
recreate this state very quickly so that I can do my own testing.

 

[eselk]

Thanks! I'll check it out, and if I find any usefull information with
my testing I'll be sure and post it.

 

[eselk]

I'll have to post my findings in another newsgroup, because they will
be more technical, and mostly related to MAPI and OLE. However, if
anyone does upgrade their hardware, they better be sure and run
Outlook, and re-activate it, before they attempt to do a sync using
ActiveSync. If not, what happens is that ActiveSync is able to read
data from Outlook, but not able to write/change your Outlook data.
This appears to really freek-out ActiveSync, which probably wasn't
tested very well to handle this kind of rare failure writing data, and
this can then lead to data corruption or data loss.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

That's to be expected - because if you aren't activated you only have the
ability to read items in outlook (or any other office app), not create new
ones.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/