Category: Annoyances

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Tired of watching the “calculating” dialog box in Windows when deleting a large file or a folder full of files? Try this instead:

    1. Open a command prompt
    2. Type following commands and hit Enter:
      DEL /F/Q/S file-or-folder-to-delete > NUL

No more “calculating” dialog box, files or folders will be deleted quickly. I wish this was the default behavior.

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Group Policy Editor is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that is used to configure and modify Group Policy settings within Group Policy Objects (GPOs). You can change many things about your Windows Installation using the Group Policy Editor. The Group Policy Editor provides administrators with a hierarchical tree structure for configuring Group Policy settings in GPOs. These GPOs can then be linked to sites, domains, and organizational units (OU) that contain computer or user objects.Unfortunately, Group Policy Editor does not work in Windows Home Editions. Luckily you can still enable Group Policy support if you are running Windows Home.

To enable the Group Policy Editor in Windows Home simply copy and paste the commands below into a batch file named EnableGroupPolicyEditor.bat (or something similar):

@echo off
>nul 2>&1 "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\cacls.exe" "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\config\system"
if '%errorlevel%' NEQ '0' (
goto getAdmin
) else ( goto gotAdmin )
:getAdmin
echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
set params = %*:"="
echo UAC.ShellExecute "cmd.exe", "/c %~s0 %params%", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
"%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
del "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
exit /b
:gotAdmin
pushd "%~dp0"
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~3*.mum >List.txt
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~3*.mum >>List.txt
for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . List.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"
pause

About the batch file:
This batch file checks if it’s running as Admin and if not, gets Admin rights and restarts the batch file.
After getting Admin rights the batch file downloads and installs the Windows components needed to use the Group Policy Editor.
After saving the batch file you can double-click on it (no need to run as Admin, the code will get Admin levels on its own).

Once the batch file has finished running you can hit Windows+R and type gpedit.msc
This will bring up the Group Policy Editor.

Be careful with the Group Policy Editor – with great power comes great responsibility!

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Do you despise the web app versions of Office as much as me? Now you can share URLs that open your docs directly on the desktop (as it should be!)

  1. Open your doc in an Office app from Office 365, then go to File…Info…and get the path to the doc
    2. Append the appropriate prefix to the URL as follows:
      • WORD: ms-word:ofe|u|
      • EXCEL: ms-excel:ofe|u|
      • PPT : ms-powerpoint:ofe|u|
      • Others: see here
      • Your url should look something like this:
        • ms-word:ofe|u|https://your-site.sharepoint.com/your-path/Shared%20Documents/your-doc.docx?web=1
    3. Use your new URL to link directly to your Office doc and it will immediately open in the Desktop Office app for editing.
  • NOTE: Since appending the Office prefix will result in a non-standard URL, some tools will complain about the Office-specific URL and will prevent you from saving the link. Microsoft Teams is, surprisingly, one of many tools that will complain about this. I really wish the team would adopt a more standards-friendly approach (e.g. just use https://your-site.sharepoint.com/your-path/Shared%20Documents/your-doc.docx and let the browser invoke the associated application type).