palindrome
July 31st, 2007, 06:05 PM
Hello,
I have used TrueImage since Version 6 or 7, and I urged all my friends
and business-contacts to use it to save lot of hassle and time when
their gear crashes sometimes. I privately care about 10 private boxes
of computer illiterates once or two time a year.
Unfortunately, even with the simple wizard, and even with a ready made
"Task" at hand, I noticed that some of the people simply don't use
the tool as often as they should. They feel a little intimidated by all
that "computer special" stuff. When the gear fails, their last full backup
is sometimes 6 month old, which is just bad usage of provided tools.
So I wrote a small c# application that cares about all that maintenance stuff,
making backups with NERO, checking once a month for spyware etc.
All those tools have either free SDKs, alternative commandlines (Zip) or
something to script them. The users see only a funny progress bar that
some magic is happening and they have to put their external backup drive
on, and then go drink a coffe or watch tv for the next 20 minutes. It works well!
Unfortunately, it seems that the Home Versions of True Image don't have
either a SDK nor commandline nor scripting support. I managed to start a
task externally, but I can't turn off/minimize the main/status window while
doing so. I can mock around with windows-messages like "minimize" windows
etc. but it's not very stable and if some notifier windows pops up (like Skype
or Mail) the whole thing gets very unstable up to crashing something.
Asking all of them to step up to the Workstation Version 9 or 10 for MUCH
more functionality they don't need, just to get it do something "automatically"
is a little far stretched; especially you can get V9 for around the half price
of the Workstation version in some extra sales in big stores.
Is there any secret commandline switch to turn the gui off or any way to
get my hands on a NON-COMMERCIAL sdk? All other products I work with at
least give me some cheap activex controls I can use to control their thing.
If everything fails, I will dive deeper into the business of simulating
mouseclicks and minimize buttons, but I would like to prefer a more "cleaner" solution.
"Manual" Automation is the only way I can keep their gear save...
thank you
palindrome
I have used TrueImage since Version 6 or 7, and I urged all my friends
and business-contacts to use it to save lot of hassle and time when
their gear crashes sometimes. I privately care about 10 private boxes
of computer illiterates once or two time a year.
Unfortunately, even with the simple wizard, and even with a ready made
"Task" at hand, I noticed that some of the people simply don't use
the tool as often as they should. They feel a little intimidated by all
that "computer special" stuff. When the gear fails, their last full backup
is sometimes 6 month old, which is just bad usage of provided tools.
So I wrote a small c# application that cares about all that maintenance stuff,
making backups with NERO, checking once a month for spyware etc.
All those tools have either free SDKs, alternative commandlines (Zip) or
something to script them. The users see only a funny progress bar that
some magic is happening and they have to put their external backup drive
on, and then go drink a coffe or watch tv for the next 20 minutes. It works well!
Unfortunately, it seems that the Home Versions of True Image don't have
either a SDK nor commandline nor scripting support. I managed to start a
task externally, but I can't turn off/minimize the main/status window while
doing so. I can mock around with windows-messages like "minimize" windows
etc. but it's not very stable and if some notifier windows pops up (like Skype
or Mail) the whole thing gets very unstable up to crashing something.
Asking all of them to step up to the Workstation Version 9 or 10 for MUCH
more functionality they don't need, just to get it do something "automatically"
is a little far stretched; especially you can get V9 for around the half price
of the Workstation version in some extra sales in big stores.
Is there any secret commandline switch to turn the gui off or any way to
get my hands on a NON-COMMERCIAL sdk? All other products I work with at
least give me some cheap activex controls I can use to control their thing.
If everything fails, I will dive deeper into the business of simulating
mouseclicks and minimize buttons, but I would like to prefer a more "cleaner" solution.
"Manual" Automation is the only way I can keep their gear save...
thank you
palindrome