Gmail Notifier Angst

Anyone who reads this post will probably know what an evangelist (vocally enthusiastic fan) I am of Gmail. For a while I really wanted to use Outlook for a few reasons, though. Mainly, I liked how I could have everything right in one area in Outlook and to be honest, Gmail is pretty much the poor man's (or the free version of) Outlook. More than anything, I think I liked the task functionality of Outlook. However, when Gmail recently released a tasks feature in its labs section, it made me think twice about Outlook and I ultimately decided to toss it out the window (more or less).

I mean really, about the only functionality that Outlook has other than the cool tasks that I use is a blue return font which is not really anything to write home about. Also, I couldn't stand Outlook's individualized email interface (as opposed to Gmail's conversation mode, which you Gmailers will have to confess is the best thing since sliced muffins). More than anything, Outlook usually gave me a ton of headaches, didn't work the way I wanted it too, and sucked up a boat load of system resources. So until I have 20 children and need Microsoft Exchange to look at people's schedules and schedule a room for a meeting, I'll be sticking with the Google interface. And by the time those 20 younglings are old enough to be running around, Microsoft will probably be out of business because it has refused to adapt to the web 2.0 world.

So to be short in writing, I've virtually abandoned Outlook.

As I should have mentioned earlier (because it's the point of this post) one of the reason's that I loved Outlook was thanks to it's new email notifier. However, I didn't like having to open Outlook just to get to it. Now I can use the Gmail notifier when I start up Windows.

We're finally to the meat of the post. When I got around to downloading the Gnotifier, I found, to my horror, that it wouldn't work! I frantically scrambled to find an answer but came up dry at each attempt. In my desperation this morning, I happened upon a thread (post) that gave me a ray of hope. It lead me to a Google sponsored help page which was immediately and very encouraging.

Unfortunately, the help Google gave didn't really work. It said to click on a yes button when it popped up and no such button appeared. Fortunately, I've tweaked the Windows registry on my lappy before, so using my quick goat thinking, I figured it out. I'll spare you the details of what I did unless you're really interested:

Gmail notifier fix

Happy closet techiness and best of luck to you all in your seemingly unfixable fixes!