Sunday, June 20, 2010

Skydrive on your desktop

A great tool for accessing your Microsoft Skydrive as easily as a local fileshare! Our culprit this time is SDExplorer. Install, logon and you’re online! It appears right in My CompuSDExplorer in My Computerter and works fast while browsing. Speed is as always not much to brag about, about four hours to upload 2.5GB on a 100Mb-connection. Still better than most and less configuring to manage than Gladinet. Works only with Skydrive though.

 

References:

Handy installation and uninstallation utilities

Clear your computer from unnecessary programs

When buying a new computer, it is very likely that the supplier has attached a lot of programs for you to evaluate. Often, this is applications that we simply do not want. With this begins the tedious work to uninstall the various trial versions of Office Package, antivirus software of dubious character and crapware which we will never use.
A tool to speed up this process is Pcdecrapifier.
No installation required, it is enough to run the file, which can be downloaded from their website.
At boot you choose which programs are undesirable. Thereafter the uninstallation process is started. The advantage of this app is you do not have to click and choose, and choose to wait again. Everything runs on automatic. A couple of OK on the road and your computer is free of crapware, as it so fittingly called.

Speed up installation of common applications and additional

For installation of a new computer, the process of installing some standard programs can be timeconsuming.
This applies primarily to programs such as Java, Flash, Acrobat Reader and Silverlight. Applications that everyone needs right from the start to be able to move around freely on the web. Since this software is constantly updated, it is not practical to package them together. It would then be forced to make a new package each week
This is where Ninite enters into the game. From this page http://ninite.com, you can easily choose what products it is that we want, which is then packaged as a script and downloaded with the selected programs included. The advantage is that you can always download the packages from the web. These are therefore always up to date and then downloads, simply run the script from any PC. To make matters even better so says no thanks Ninite automatically to every conceivable add-on products as they try to cheat on us during the installation of these components. Example of these is the Google Toolbar, McAfee Total Protection, Live Toolbar, etc.
Very practical and effective!

Note: the bad grammar is to be blamed on Google translate. This post was originally published in a small-minded language from the polar regions


References:

Online storage solutions

This is might not be entirely relevant, cause Microsoft are in progress of making big changes to the structure and workflow of Skydrive and it’s siblings Live Mesh and Foldershare(LiveSync). However if you’re like me and using Live Mesh to sync your essential files between computers this might be of value to you.

I have a lot of pictures. 3-4GB and steadily increasing. These needs to be backed up somewhere and I don’t really believe burning a lot of discs that’ll I'll loose anyways. Picasa is too limited i space and like Live Spaces, everything is about sharing there. Which is not always something we want to do with photos, believe it or not.

Skydrive was looking quite good for its 25GB of storage, but management was limited to using webgui which was too much work. I was looking for a way to access Skydrive through Explorer when I came across this little simple solutions.

Get the skydrive address for one of your folders. For example http://cid-c2daa1333635cc9a.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public
Now change it to this:
https://wb9rpt.docs.live.net/c2daa1333635cc9a/.Public

Add this address to a custom network location from My Computer interface. Now you can drag and drop files to skydrive!

Caution though, it’s not very reliable. When trying to shuffle +2GB for uploading it choppy at best. For better performance one might use SDExplorer, which seems promising. Gladinet is also a good candidate, but I’ll usally try to avoid 3rd party applications when there’s an built-in alternative.

If it’s not working for you, try and access Skydrive from Office 2010 first. This might be necessary to “activate” the feature.

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