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Re: [LUG] Feel my pain

 

On 01/05/13 20:01, Grant Phillips-Sewell wrote:
> I do apologise, Mr Meowski, I hit reply in Gmail and typed without thinking.

No problem, typical annoying default mail agent behaviour. You even have
to set this manually in Thunderbird.

> As I don't use Windows at all and very few of my customers have
> Windows 8 (yet), I have not really looked into this very much. I came
> across Pokki by chance; it looked interesting and useful. Classic
> Shell, however, fulfills both my interest in finding for others a
> potential resolution to the "Where's the Start Menu gone?" problem,
> and my interest in recommending Open Source first. Thank you. :)

Trust me on Pokki - it even comes with Instagram 'helpers' which I think
probably tells you all you need to now about it. Generic crappy spyware
type rubbish: avoid.

But Classic Shell is an absolute must - as you say, it's a one-stop fix
for the inevitable "where is my damned start menu" questions following a
win8 upgrade and completely indispensable (works on Server 2012 too).
There are some slicker alternatives but they both cost money and aren't
open source, so Classic Shell wins by default.

> That's funny... I've just gone through the "Upload file to Google
> Drive" option in the browser version and it popped up a dialog box
> asking about conversion. The Windows/Mac desktop/client software may
> not support conversion, but Google Drive (in a browser) most certainly
> does.

Hmm... *goes off and checks* Well, holy crap, you're completely correct
- my apologies. Never seen that before, but I'd not used the browser
interface before, only 'grive' as a Linux CLI and the tray agent tools
on Windows and Mac. I read this:
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2407404 which
seems to claim that you can convert outside of the browser interface by
opening your Google Drive folder and right/option clicking on files
therein as well but I just tried that on win7 and win8 VMs and it does
not work as described (at all, actually). But I also tried through a
browser for the first time and it did indeed act exactly as you
described, so thanks. Still entirely unconvinced as to whether it's a
good idea or not, I didn't actually let it convert any of my test files.
Maybe I should have...

> Ooh, another fun bit of software. Thank you again. :)
>
> Grant.

No problem! This is as [OT] as it gets, but if anyone wants any more
heads ups on Windows admin essential tools then just say. Just to get
you started though:

ninite.com (automated multi-installer)
sysprep (essential admin deployment tool)
sysinternals suite (legendary utilities collection)
cygwin (linux sub-environment on windows)
combofix (clean system)
filehippo updater (update checker for non-system software)
truecrypt (volume crypto, like LVM/LUKS on linux)
WSUS offline (automated windows system update)

Each one of those will save you pain every time you ever have to touch a
windows machine. Set up the portable versions on a USB drive and/or
network share and you can mount it on any windows box you'll ever touch
and automate almost completely any major admin task. I do this so I can
have more time doing stuff I enjoy, like playing on Linux.

Regards

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