General Tech

MMC 3.0 and Windows Server 2008

Missy Koslosky — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:37:03 GMT

Okay, I'll admit this may be child's play to some, but I just ran across an issue I didn't know about - I was prepping a Windows 2008 server for an installation, and needed the MMC on it. So I went to the MMC download page and tried to install the program (if you know what's coming, please don't mock me). I received a (unhelpful) error message that "Not enough storage is available to process this command".

Interesting. This was a brand new server, so I checked the disk space. There's TONS of available disk. What the heck?

I then did some digging around on the internet, without finding much, except this Microsoft KB article - Misleading error message when you install an update package in Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008: Not enough storage is available to process this command. Not much help there, if I'm getting the error message I'm going to assume that I have the wrong version. And no help on how to fix the problem. Frustrating.

Well, then I did what I should have done in the first place, and asked my co-worker Tim if there was a trick to installing Microsoft Management Console 3.0 on a Windows Server 2008 machine. He quickly (and politely) schooled me by replying, "Umm.. I thought that 3.0 was built into 2K8".

Oh.

Disappointed

Missy Koslosky — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:30:19 GMT

Yesterday, I called HP's technical support line because of a problem with one of the laptops in our house. I spent an hour on hold before I hung up. That is absolutely ridiculous, and it's unfortunately all too common an experience.

Using Gmail for Personal Email

Missy Koslosky — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:55:57 GMT

Since 1999, I've used an mvps.org e-mail address as my primary method of personal communication; several months ago, the wonderful folks who run mvps.org (free!) for the MVP community had some issues, and made some changes to their policies. This led me to try an alternative approach - I started having Gmail fetch all messages from my mvps.org account.

After spending some time trying to adjust to Gmail's interface, and having difficulties with the un-sortability of e-mail in Gmail (I know, I know, Google's theory is that you can just search for messages, but frankly that just wasn't working for me), I set up Outlook to download my mail from Gmail using POP, while also leaving my email in Gmail, just in case. This lets me happily sort my mail (and Oh! I love to sort it, and I love the various views I can create, and I love Search Folders too!).

The good news about Gmail is that they really have removed a lot of the spam I was seeing -- for the past 30 days, I have over 6,000 messages in Gmail's spam folder - when I was using my mvps.org account without filtering the messages through Gmail, Outlook's junk mail rules took care of most of the spam, but I still needed to manually clear out messages, and I was in the habit of doing so every few days. With Gmail, because I rarely look at the web interface and rely on Outlook as my client, I wasn't looking in my spam folder. Bad idea for me, because apparently Gmail thinks that, among others, my husband's cousin, who's in China, and my MVP lead, who has a Microsoft address, are lousy spammers. And they're not, they're lovely people! Now I'm looking at going through all 6K spam messages to see who else has been mis-identified as a spammer. Sigh.

Other gripes about Gmail's online interface:

I'm really used to having inline spell and grammar checking. I don't make tons of errors, but I do make them. Outlook lets me know this on the fly, with Gmail I have to think about it.
I can't make folders. See my comment on search above. I LOVE folders and don't think search is adequate.
Why oh why can't I flag a message with a reminder?? Stupid stars just aren't enough of a visual cue for me.
I want a preview pane. The snippet of the message is helpful, but a reading pane is so much more useful

I do like the way Gmail handles conversations, and wish that Outlook was better in the conversation view; I've found it to be unreliable in the past.

Oh, and someone else named Missy apparently thinks that my Gmail address is actually her Gmail address. It isn't. Her friends send me cute jokes at times, but I've also gotten messages with business information that I KNOW I shouldn't have seen. If you're the other Missy, please sort out what your real Gmail address is, because I get enough mail as it is! (Why can't the messages from her friends be flagged as spam, instead of those from my friends??)