Yammer Highlights June 2020

Dennis Parsons

All Company

There was a flurry of activity (panic?) around the announcement of the inadvertent mass deletion of e-mails from many of our e-mail accounts. A few of us got stuck in fairly promptly and manually recovered our deleted e-mails – a rather tedious procedure when dealing with 10,000s of e-mails. I spent roughly five hours recovering 31,700 e-mails! Sheer bloody-minded determination anyone?

One member suggested using a PowerShell command to automate the recovery not knowing this approach was already being explored by our admins. Thankfully they were able to implement an automated recovery procedure so the recovery could be handled by Melb PC rather than having to be done manually by individual members.

Well done guys for solving this one!

<https://www.yammer.com/melbpc.org.au/#/Threads/show?threadId=744584812019712>

Linux Chat

I reckon one of the great things about learning to use Linux is it increases your knowledge of general computing concepts by exposing you to a world beyond Windows, prompting you to ask questions and think about the way computers work.

Merv is contemplating installing Linux Mint (one of the more user-friendly Linux distributions) on a laptop and wanted to know if he could transfer some files from a Win10 system via a portable USB drive. Sure was the answer! Merv was somewhat confused by the answers because he was under the misapprehension that the filesystem type (NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, Ext4, etc) was a property of individual files rather than the drive they are stored on.

We eventually managed to get him sorted out by insisting he write “I will henceforth remember that a file is just a file” 500 times on the blackboard (in jest of course)!

<https://www.yammer.com/melbpc.org.au/#/Threads/show?threadId=743804760014848>

Computer Help

Di asked how she could install a newer version of a program without overwriting the older version she currently had installed. She’d been caught out before by a new version she didn’t like so wanted to keep the old version and try out the new one before committing to the change.

Unfortunately, this isn’t possible unless the installation package specifically accommodates it so running a virtual machine such as VirtualBox was suggested, noting this requires having a copy of the operating system to be used available to install. And that’s a bit of a problem if you want to use Windows because you need to pay for it or install it without providing a key and put up with the limitations of an unregistered installation.

It was then mentioned that Microsoft had recently introduced Windows Sandbox, an inbuilt virtual machine for Win10. It requires Win10 Pro or Enterprise so doesn’t work with Home (although this limitation can be circumvented) and needs the virtualisation setting enabled in the BIOS/firmware.

This looks like a rather useful tool to have available for those who like to fiddle – a good way of hopefully avoiding making a mess of your system when experimenting.

<https://www.yammer.com/melbpc.org.au/#/Threads/show?threadId=738291570311168>