Soporific Airs (DJ Bolivia): 10

Friday, February 17, 2017

How to Get Rid of MicroSoft OneDrive

If you're like me, the MS OneDrive app drives you crazy. To be clear, I'm not trying to bash MicroSoft here. I enjoy a lot of their products. But I often work in remote bush camps and areas without internet, which makes OneDrive (and similar apps from competing companies) really annoying for me.

When I first decided to uninstall OneDrive, I found out that it has been embedded more deeply in the Windows 10 OS than I had expected. Here's a link to the Office Support web page that describes disabling, hiding, or uninstalling it:

https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Turn-off-or-uninstall-OneDrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0

The problem with the information on that page is that if you're using the Home version of Windows 8.0 or 8.1, the Group Policy editor is not available. And almost nobody tells you that! So tons of pages telling people how to go into gpedit and disable OneDrive will not work unless you're on the Pro version.

Moving on, I tried some suggestions from Life Hacker, at the following page:

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-completely-uninstall-onedrive-in-windows-10-1725363532

However, my attempts at killing it through the Command Line Interface (CLI) were also a failure. The only consolation in this case was to see the frustrated comments from other people who were also pointing out the lack of gpedit access through MMC to anyone who doesn't have the Pro version.

However, TechJourney.net finally came to the rescue. I found an article there which allows someone who is comfortable with editing the Registry to get rid of OneDrive. Here's the link:

https://techjourney.net/disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-completely-in-windows-10/

This should only be attempted if you're comfortable with computers. It's a pretty easy fix, although you want to be careful that you don't change anything else in your Registry, as that can really mess things up and make your computer very dysfunctional. But at long as you follow their instructions carefully, you should be fine.

Good luck!

- Jonathan Clark
www.djbolivia.ca

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I'm Jonathan Clark, known online as DJ Bolivia. Do you want to learn more about DJ'ing and music production? If so, visit:

djbolivia.ca/training

If you happen to enjoy techno tracks, most of my tracks are available as free downloads from this link:

djbolivia.ca/tracks

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support! I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

YouTube: youtube.com/djbolivia

SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/djbolivia

Blogger: djbolivia.blogspot.com

Main Site: www.djbolivia.ca

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Windows Shortcut Keys

This post is about some useful computer tricks for PC’s. Apologies to Mac users.

A few weeks ago, I was doing some computer work with someone. I've done a lot of computer programming in my life, and I initially came to university to study computer science (switching away from the music program at the last second). However, despite that background, the guy that I was working with is a whole lot smarter than I am when it comes to computers.

However, as I was watching him do something, he had to minimize about eight windows at one point so he could see the desktop of the laptop that he was working on. I was surprised by this, because he usually does things very quickly and efficiently. I said, “Did you know that you can hold down the ‘flying window’ key in the left corner, and press the letter D, and the desktop will appear automatically?” He didn’t. At that point, I figured that I should make a list of useful keyboard shortcuts that people would find useful. Of course, there are already lists on the internet, because Windows comes with almost one hundred built in short-cuts. However, I’m just going to make a “short list” of about a dozen of the most useful short-cuts here:

CTRL-S: “Save” a file. I do this automatically about every two minutes when I'm working on something, although to be honest computers are about a hundred times more reliable than they were twenty years ago (before modern-day internet and email, if you can imagine that kind of a horrible, archaic society).

CTRL-P: “Print” a file. Yes, most of these commands can also be found in the menu bar at the top of the screen with just two mouse clicks, but if your hands are already on the keyboard and you know how to type properly, it is far faster to use the shortcuts than to move your hand over to the mouse.

CTRL-Z: “Undo” last command. This doesn’t always work, and some programs have stranger combinations, like SHIFT-CTRL-Z to do an Undo. But it does work in a ton of programs. And CTRL-Y often is a "re-do" last command, if you change your mind after an undo. I use these all the time in programs from people like Abobe, or in Word or Excel docs.

CTRL-C: “Copy” whatever is highlighted on the screen.

CTRL-V: “Paste” whatever is highlighted on the screen. And by the way, can someone tell me why the letter “V” stands for “paste”??

Of course, the three most common formatting commands (Bold, Italic, and Underline) can all be done with a short-cut. Just highlight your selection and hit either CTRL-B, CTRL-I, or CTRL-U respectively. And these same commands, of course, also work as a toggle, so you can turn them on then type a little bit, then turn them back off.

FlyingWindow-E: Brings up Windows Explorer (not to be confused with Internet Explorer). I love this short-cut; perhaps my favorite.

FlyingWindow-D: Brings up the Desktop, as mentioned above. Also useful. Strangely, FlyingWindow-M does the same thing, I think, because it means “Minimize” all open windows. Maybe there's a distinction, but I can’t think of it.

FlyingWindow-R: Brings up the “Run” dialog, which normally is accessed by going to “start” then to “run.” This is mostly only useful for the real nerds. I don’t even use it (well, not much).

FlyingWindow-C: If you have “IntelliType” turned on, this brings up the Control Panel. Useful, except that I don’t have IntelliType turned on.

Of course, there are several dozen more, but they start to get pretty esoteric. For a decent list, check this out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449 (scroll down the page a bit, past the notice about support for winXP having ended).

And before I stop, I’ll mention one last shortcut that makes me laugh. Windows just wouldn’t be itself without lots of features that are completely nonsensical and redundant. If you have IntelliType turned on, and do a “FlyingWindow-S” it will toggle the caps lock on and off. Why you would want to do that instead of just hitting the caps lock key itself (which is already under your left pinky) is beyond me. Maybe it’s just a way of giving your fingers some extra exercise, although I can think of better ways to do that.