Windows 10 Explorer Slow on Open

This wound me up this week. Every time I tried to open an Explorer instance to view some files I’d have to wait what seemed like an eternity before the window opened. It must have been about 30 seconds, maybe longer.

Ultimately it turned out to be a problem of my own making – kind of.

I’d repeatedly visited a Samba/CIFS share on a virtual Linux box I’ve been working on. Windows decided to add the share to my “Quick Access” list. But because the virtual box isn’t always on, the share wasn’t accessible and so explorer would have to wait for it to time out before showing me my C: drive.

Just clear the “not so” Quick Access list and presto, Explorer is back to opening quickly again.

Press Windows Key (or open Start Menu), type “folder” and open the “File Explorer Options” that are listed. Then click the “Clear” button under Privacy to get things back to as they should be.

I Googled plenty that recommended MSCONFIG and stopping services like Windows Search and Cortana, adding Registry Keys and other nonsense. When all it was is a Quick Access entry.

 

PHP7.0, Microsoft SQL Driver & Debian (stretch)

What a mission today has been. I think I’ll ultimately roll back to using Debian Jessie as Stretch isn’t a supported system, yet.

To get the MS SQL ODBC driver working even in Jessie appears to be a challenge. In Stretch I almost surrendered. It is working, but I do think it’s a bit of a hack as I’ve had to install an older libssl1.0.0 and enable the locale en_US.UTF-8.

As it’s downloaded using apt over https you’ll need to add in the apt-transport-https package to your system:

$ sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

Or you will get this error

Reading package lists… Done                     

E: The method driver /usr/lib/apt/methods/https could not be found.

N: Is the package apt-transport-https installed?

E: Failed to fetch https://packages.microsoft.com/debian/9/prod/dists/stretch/InRelease  

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

PHP development voted out the inclusion of MS SQL to the project so now you must compile and install it yourself. There are some very good instructions out there to help you – even from Microsoft.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/sql/connect/odbc/linux-mac/installing-the-microsoft-odbc-driver-for-sql-server

Laravel & PHP Minimum Requirements

Make sure you’ve installed php and the necessary modules before trying to create a new Laravel project.

$ sudo apt-get install php-fpm
$ sudo apt-get install php-mbstring php-zip

The order of php-fpm and php is important as putting them the other way around you’ll find you get apache2 installed when you probably don’t want that.

Then you should be able to create your empty project using composer without any complaints.

$ cd /var/www
$ composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel [project]