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Computing Rants!

Adobe Creative Cloud – Horrors

On one hand where I work, I am one of the people who requires access to the creative cloud product with work, primarily a lot of my stuff tends to be done with Acrobat – Conversions between formats or editing of PDF files in there being the bulk of the work and some minor photoshopping, usually brightening or cropping photographs as needed when they havent been taken with ideal exposures (though I am no way near being any sort of expert when it comes to retouching)

As actual packages, the programs work well in the suite and usually without any issues, aside from the management program “Creative Cloud Desktop”, every time I have tried to update this piece of software, it has caused massive issues with my machine and fails somewhat spectacularly.

Originally we had issues with the firewall with it, cue our service provider having a list of sites to open up and allow us access through to, worse still now I find that the latest “update” would refuse to install from the program yet again with the dreaded error 50 – the instructions on a quick bit of google-fu were to download the ominous “AdobeCreativeCloudCleanerTool” (I have always taken it to be a bit of a bad omen about a program, that it requires a removal tool, the uninstall functions should be the only thing necessary to banish a program from the machine in my mind) and remove CC from my machine, rename some directories and then reinstall CC onto the machine.  A task which has fast become the norm now for how I update it on my work machine, having failed each time to get it to update the desktop application at all, including one incident where it went so hilariously wrong that I had to completely remove the suite in its entirety and redownload it to get it working again.

Adobe program a suite of applications that are industry standard and work outstandingly for their purpose, but then they seem to fail on the main bugbear of mine when it comes to programming, supporting the installation and the enterprise administration of a program when it comes to the software, their in a similar boat to the horror that is Avid Sibelius from my point of view, where they just don’t support stuff well for a network.

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Computing

HP Chromebook – 10 Months in

Its been 10 months I realised yesterday since I took the plunge and bought myself a chromebook, its going reasonably well, files are all stored easily as are emails with Google, dont find that I have a lot of need for letter writing so Docs isn’t used massively by me either.

Machine is solid from HP and the battery still lasts at least a full working day on heavy/prolonged usage, the screen is becoming a bit irritating – 1366×768 was the max res of my SVGA monitor that I bought 8 years ago now and the panel does tire the eyes if used for a prolonged period, so the screen is letting it down I feel, thats an issue with chromebooks in general I think as we are only now seeing he adoption of IPS screens and HD resolutions, everything else has been fine on it to date, I have a mobile broadband dongle that just worked fine out of the box on it.

I haven’t had to workaround any websites on my chromebook to date, so it seems that on most of my daily browsing of the web, I tend to avoid anything that requires Java as a product I have come to realise, or failing that most websites I use regularly have in place workarounds now to negate that.  I haven’t had any other issues with the browsing of the machine and email has worked fine.

I would have negated the need for windows laptops completely if it was not for some of the little things that just cannot be done on a chromebook – RDP into a windows based machine, through an MS based VPN is just not possible at the moment, I can connect to my home machine fine with Chrome Remote Desktop, but Work is an impossibility because of the firewalls and lack of support for MS based VPNs.

I am still pleased with the purchase overall after nearly a year, its worked impeccably so far in what it does offer with minimal fuss.

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Computing Rants!

Service Packs – Missing – Reward Offered

Second time this month now I have found myself cursing out M$ and frustrated by the lack of provision for service packs any more for their products, first was a reimage of a machine where I work, Windows 7 64 bit image went out flying from the MDT server, got the base image on within 12 minutes on the 1gb network, what then tailed it was a nearly 4 hour cycle through 200+ of various security/windows updates from the WSUS server before the MDT process had completed allowing the machine to be logged onto and used.

Second machine was a virtual server today on our hyper-v platform, 2008 R2 – standard image with full installation and only the IIS role installed for its pending webdav setup, a meagre 160 updates took over 3 hours to complete to the point where I had to leave it in sheer frustration – box was not specced horribly, had a decent amount of CPU and RAM and the discs are all high end SAS drives for it, but the sheer amount was overwhelming and stopped play for the work I had planned for an entire afternoon.

I wish they would give some serious consideration to this and set a threshold, when it hits 150 updates and above, start planning for a service pack, as its costs in work time get.

Categories
Computing

Windows 10 Preview – First Thoughts

I have signed up for the preview and sorted out a virtual PC on my machine to have a look at it tonight, as I don’t have much going on with WoW and need a break from the game.

First thoughts on it so far-

Annoyance – Why is that 5-10 minute mandatory initial wait still in place on this version ? Where its Getting Apps Ready and Setting everything up, I don’t know what is actually taking place at this point, but its not a good thing to have you sat waiting through this.

Start Menu – Massive improvement on the Metro horror and nice to see that its been replaced with something a lot more sensible, even if it does appear to be very similar to the Cinnamon start menu when used.

Look – Finally a pet-hate of mine has been looked at by Microsoft, the need to window off every application with a border, its nice to have a window open now and just have a thin black edge to border the window, finally playing catch-up to Linux/OS X.  On the flipside of that, their still mucking about with this transparent / glass like shading of the taskbar and windows, which does nothing for me at all, icons need a bit of revamping.

Store – This is an improvement on previous as well, its a bit easier to navigate I am finding and has gotten a lot of stuff in line with other shops like Google Play and Apple’s App Store, with its top lists.

Overall so far its looking a winner compared to 8/8.1 for me personally and going to be interesting to see how it improves as we get nearer to launch.

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Personal

A new year – 2015 – Going Forward !

It has been a while since I have posted anything onto my blog, largely because I am extremely self critical of what I publish also because I have a habit of being too “Wordy” putting long words into place usually where I should be keeping things simple, having no writing experience makes it a little harder as its been some 16 years now since I have had any english lesson’s.

Its a good time to recap though and look forward, its early days, but hopefully going to be a good year going forward, I have a personal project that’s started that I may get the nerve to publish when I get a bit further along with it and more confident in achieving its goals.