Messages

5176

General Software Discussion / Re: copy paste between 2 computers on separate networks?

« on: May 17, 2009, 03:07 AM »

Network Clipboard - Use network clipboard to instantly copy files, texts, images, internet adresses between different computers!  Press Copy on one computer and go to different PC and press Paste. The contents go with you.

Control-Alt-C to Copy
Control-Alt-V to Paste

Standalone executable, just specify a shared folder on a machine somewhere.

It installs a shortcut into Startup when run, wrap it in a batch/AutoIt(HK) file if you don't want this.

5177

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 16, 2009, 09:12 PM »

Just tried restoring an activated Win7 from the VM to real hardware.  Either Win7 reverts to unactivated due to the hardware changes or PDB9PE removes the relevant file/registry entry.

Re-activation worked without a problem which seems to imply the keys they're giving out at the moment are either time-limited VLKs or they distinguish a VM as being non-consequential and allow it.

EDIT: This time I didn't boot into Safe Mode first and there was no problem, W7 installed drivers and then asked for a Restart.

Now to get it into my old laptop 

Even if you do get it to work you won't avoid activation issues in software that requires activation as the hardware machine ID will have changed significantly.

-Carol Haynes (May 15, 2009, 05:51 PM)

Not much of a problem for me, since I (fortunately) have very little software is hardware-tied.

-f0dder (May 16, 2009, 11:27 AM)

Same here, the only software I have besides Windows that is 'locked' to the hardware is DaemonTools Pro Advanced - and they at least allow the users themselves to revoke the license on one machine to install it on another, something MS could learn from.

Update: It seems no matter what I try I can't get from a VM to my old laptop, (P4 2.4GHz SKT478 ATI chipset, 768MB, 40GB HDD), so I guess I'll class that as a flop.

Now to try a VM to my real hardware....after a full OS backup or two.

5178

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 16, 2009, 08:26 AM »

Update: Migration of Windows 7 from VirtualPC to real hardware.

Status:      

I did it!!!!

The VM is just VirtualPC 2007 running an Athlon 7750 BE, running Windows 7 x86 Ultimate fresh install, (not activated).
The 'sacrificial PC' is one I just built for someone: E5300, 4GB, Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L, Gigabyte 8400GS and 320GB SATA HDD.

I installed Paragon Disk Backup 9 Personal Edition into the VM this time, (I was using a Rescue Media ISO image previously and booting the VM off of it - it shouldn't have made any difference but wtf), I made a full hard disk image of the VM drive, (basic install of W7 + PDB9PE), to another VM drive.  Then copied it to an external 2.5" and booted the sacrificial PC off of the PDB9PE Rescue Media CD.

I restored the image using the 'Restore to different hardware' option, when it had finished I entered Safe Boot, it detected and installed drivers for the hardware and then restarted.............

..........and came up running 

Device Manager shows no unknown devices and all the installed ones are correctly identified.

I think the reason I wasn't having much luck with the laptop is that I was just trying to restore the boot partition without screwing up a data partition - I'll have another look at this now I know it's definitely possible.

BTW, a post by someone on Wilders quoting Paragon support says that the 'Adaptive Restore' feature actually supports XP, 2003, 2008, Vista, (basically everything since XP), and Win7 was coming - I think I can say it's here

EDIT: The restoration took less than 10 minutes from Power On to Win 7 up and running.  A bit quicker than a full install from scratch.

5179

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 15, 2009, 02:57 AM »

Probably a year ago I downloaded and used a free tool from VMware that is able to take a normal PC and turn it into a virtual machine for VMware. The wizard that comes with this software really works. Would you be able to tell me which are the possibilities of conversion from the Paragon suite?

-Shades (May 14, 2009, 11:06 PM)

We were actually talking about going the other way, from a Virtual Machine -> real hardware.

As f0dder mentioned in his original post, it would allow you to set up your OS exactly how you want it and then transfer to real hardware.  You can experiment without the fear of doing an irreparable screwup that would require having to reinstall or restore an image - with a VM you could just turn it off telling it to ignore any changes made, (well in VirtualPC you can, I don't know about VMware, VirtualBox, Parallels Workstation).

I believe it will function much the same as Acronis' Universal Restore does, basically remove all reference to any installed hardware drivers and prompt you for replacements if it can't find what it wants during restore, (for IDE/SCSI/SATA devices so it can do the restore), after that, I believe, Vista (or Win7) should detect all hardware changes and install appropriate drivers from the CAB files.

But, never fear, having been convinced by a discount to purchase PDM2009Suite - the experiment continues as I try to get a recalcitrant basic Win7 install out of it's secure nesting place in VirtualPC onto a genuine 4 year old laptop

Actually I wasn't totally convinced by the discount, I've found over the last 2 weeks or so that I actually enjoy using Paragon products and their Rescue Media is just magic compared to Acronis' basic offering.

This is not an ad for Paragon but if anyone's interested, PM me for the link to a 30% discount until the 24^th.

5180

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 14, 2009, 09:08 PM »

And just in time to help in this endeavour:

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite -

Adaptive Restore - A powerful and unique technology that allows you to restore Windows Vista to completely different types of hardware or even to virtual machines.

5181

Living Room / Re: Looking for a newsgroup news reader

« on: May 14, 2009, 09:02 PM »

Privacy problems were second thing which bothered me. Many people were against archiving their messages (mostly agressive ones) by Google and called that "privacy violation". In my opinion: it was stupid and I would never delete any message if I wear Google's boots.

-fenixproductions (May 14, 2009, 07:31 PM)

You have to wonder where these people were when Dejanews was archiving all the text newsgroups then.........before they were taken over by Google.

All they've got to do is put the following in the header and hope the archive honours it:

x-no-archive: yes

Something of which I'm sure the Google-phobes do already, although it won't be deleted until 6 days later.

Or they could just not post.

5182

General Software Discussion / Re: EC wants software makers held liable for code

« on: May 14, 2009, 03:51 PM »

If either answer is "yes", then why do politicians get held to looser standards when the amount of power they wield -- and thus the damage they can do -- is so great?

-CWuestefeld (May 14, 2009, 01:52 PM)

I believe you answered your own question right there.

They wield the power, they make the rules, do you honestly think that they would jeopardise their own financial/political well-being willingly?

The only time any politician, (with very few exceptions), would willingly do something moral is when they've been caught doing the immoral.

Take the recent UK political sh*t-storm over politician expense claims as an example.
If they hadn't have been caught, would the public have heard about it and been allowed to decide for themselves whether it was morally OK for the politicians to claim them?

5183

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 13, 2009, 11:38 PM »

OK, the results of restoring Win7 from a VM to a completely different real hardware configuration are: [Drum roll]..............Complete failure

I finally managed to get a full restore done after doing another backup in VPC using no compression.  The restore operation on the Acer took over 2hrs for some reason, (going from a VPC with a 2.7GHz Athlon7750BE to a laptop with a P4 2.4GHz), but it did fully work.  Although it would've have been faster to install from scratch.
I've got no idea why the earlier restores kept failing at the same file since the amount I was restoring is only about 1/8 the size of the backup/restore operations I was doing earlier in the week on a real PC.

Unfortunately, when I tried to boot the Acer into Win7 it complained of software/hardware changes and recommended inserting the installation disc and doing a Repair - which I did.
The repair searched for existing installations and found there was a problem with the Startup and offered to fix them - OK, I said.

After that, it just kept saying there was problems with starting Windows due to possible software/hardware changes whenever I tried to boot.

At that point I decided it didn't work.

So, as the nun said to the priest, "Bummer!"

Maybe the hardware config was too radically different for Win7 to cope with because there's bound to be the limit of how many hardware items you can change before copy protection kicks in.

Then again, I could get a completely new computer with that much money

-Lashiec (May 13, 2009, 06:19 PM)

For that much money I could build two decent computers 

5184

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 13, 2009, 07:25 PM »

Next, for the disk imaging applications... I followed  the link to the Paragon Drive Backup site and registered for a license code. There was no download there, so I though I was supposed to grab the trial. Looked nice, features were good etc, but no place to enter the license code, and thus I couldn't test the backup functionality. Considered whether I had to grab the files from #2 site in 4wd's first reply (which doesn't feel 100% right since it's not Paragon's own site), but I only got ~20kb/s from there, so I uninstalled and rebooted... and then my system was hosed, because the uninstaller for some reason had removed the 32bit MS VC++ runtimes from my system, wtf? Fortunately I was still able to use explorer.exe to locate some random application that had decided to bundle the runtimes in it's own install folder and copy to %WINDIR%\SysWow64... phew.

-f0dder (May 13, 2009, 06:39 PM)

Must have been just the trial that does that because I've uninstalled the full PE version at least twice over the last 2 weeks, (trying to find whatever new program that hosed my NIC), and both times the system still kept booting fine afterwards, (oh, and it was some stupid network thing I installed for a look-see that hosed my NIC not DB9).

Now that I think about it, I believe I got DB9PE through GiveAwayOfTheDay, sorry my error.

5185

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 13, 2009, 03:13 AM »

Btw, does the Paragon app do a raw partition dump sector-by-sector, or will be backup file be limited to the used partition size?

You can specify Raw processing under the Advanced tab during a backup which is what you want I believe.

-4wd (May 13, 2009, 02:21 AM)

Actually I'd prefer only backing up the used part, getting a 12gig file for 4gig used is silly - but if the raw dump is an option then it's all cool.

-f0dder (May 13, 2009, 02:38 AM)

Sorry, misread you - by default it only backs up the used portion as per TI.  You have to enable RAW if you want the whole disk including unused portions.
Also, as I mentioned above, by default it doesn't include pagefile.sys but you can tell it to include it, although I don't see the point.

I'm just about to do a backup of my VirtPC W7 and then I'll restore it to something, possibly my old Acer laptop, and see what happens.

-4wd (May 13, 2009, 02:21 AM)

Thanks for doing this!

No problem, backup just finished - I did Partition backups. The MBR and then the OS partition because I didn't know if a whole disk backup would let me restore to just the boot partition of the Acer.  Now I just got to copy them from the VirtPC to the real PC so I can copy them to the Acer so I can screw it up 

The rescue image interface looks nice... can it be put on a USB stick, and can it access network locations?

I don't see why not, it's just a Linux system with an initial LILO menu - there is plenty of info for making a flash drive bootable for Linux.   The worst that could happen is that you copy the ISO, (~55MB), to the flash drive and then boot it using GRUB4DOS which is child's play.

EDIT: Or you could just select to build the Rescue Disk onto Flash Device from the Rescue Media Builder........DOH! 

While I think of it, here's the initial menu:

(I ask too many questions instead of trying myself  , but I'm currently quite busy with school exam programming project)

What else are us retired folk good for 

EDIT: Just in the midst of restoring Win7 to the Acer but I thought I'd mention this now:  DB9 can restore to different hardware, (Select it before initiating the operation - XP/2003 based only), this is normally something you have to buy from Acronis IIRC, Universal Restore?

And yes, you get the option to resize the partition you're restoring.

UPDATE: So far I've tried 3 times to restore to the Acer and all times it has locked up when it reaches the same file, (winhlp32.exe), at about 97% completed.
I tried once with 'Restore to different hardware' turned on but it still failed on the same file.  The backup verifies OK, so I'm just trying from another source, if that doesn't work I'll try another backup.

I tried booting the Acer even though the restore failed and Win7 displays a warning saying software/hardware has changed and requests the Win7 install CD.  So it looks like it might be possible if I can just get a full restoration to happen.

5186

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 13, 2009, 02:21 AM »

4wd: thanks for the suggestion. I recall grabbing a copy of the free drivebackup, and for some reason not being super impressed with it (can't recall why, though). You say it has a rescue disk, but I assume that's strictly for restoring a backup - it would be nice being able to backup from the bootmedia as well. But if the boot media can restore backup from, say, a network location, I could live with the boot media only being able to restore.

-f0dder (May 13, 2009, 01:38 AM)

Using the Recovery Media you can:

I'm pretty sure that what you want is covered in that lot

Btw, does the Paragon app do a raw partition dump sector-by-sector, or will be backup file be limited to the used partition size?

You can specify Raw processing under the Advanced tab during a backup which is what you want I believe.

You can also specify the whole HDD, the MBR or just track 0.

Wrt. backup a virtual drive and restore to real drive - doesn't Win7 install all drivers during a normal install ?
If so, when you booted it would it not just reinstall all the "new" drivers for the real PC from it's CAB, (or whatever), files ?

-4wd (May 12, 2009, 10:50 PM)

Very good question! That would definitely solve a lot of problems. And since I will be installing to a SATA drive, there hopefully shouldn't be any boot device driver problems. I guess there could be other problems, though - like, the location of the boot device being different between the VM and the physical hardware you try restoring to. I don't know supermuch about how the BCD works, but it's probably fixable like boot.ini was, but would the registry also contain some invalid entries?

Doesn't most of the registry refer to locations as the Volume, (eg. C:, D:, etc) ?

With only the boot.ini, (or BCD thing), referring to rdisk and partition, etc.

Who knows, maybe the Boot Corrector on the PDB9 Rescue disk will fix any boot problem

I'm just about to do a backup of my VirtPC W7 and then I'll restore it to something, possibly my old Acer laptop, and see what happens.

EDIT: Changed the list to a pic because it looks nicer

5187

General Software Discussion / Re: Win7, disk imaging, vmware

« on: May 12, 2009, 10:50 PM »

Regarding Disk Imaging:

What about Paragon Drive Backup 9 Personal Edition ?
The above is a comparison between the Special Edition, (same as Personal), version and full version as well as registration page.  If you can live without updates, support or WinPE based recovery disk then they're the same.

Available free from a post on GHacks, 32 and 64 bit available.

I've just recently installed it to see how it compares to TI Home 11 and it seems to be not that bad.  In fact if it weren't for the fact that I need TIH11 installed so I could include it on my Win/VistaPE CD I'd probably switch.

During the last week, (cleaning/upgrading a pc for someone), I've used the bootable Rescue disk to image/restore a system approx. 5-8 times without a problem.  As part of it's basic options it also ignores pagefile.sys, (not sure about hiberfil.sys), so it's not included.

It can restore individual files, do incremental file and differential partition backup, it's FREE.

Here's a grab of the interface:



Wrt. backup a virtual drive and restore to real drive - doesn't Win7 install all drivers during a normal install ?
If so, when you booted it would it not just reinstall all the "new" drivers for the real PC from it's CAB, (or whatever), files ?

I might try it, I've got Win7x86 running under VirtualPC.

5188

General Software Discussion / Re: RAMdisk on XP 32bit - brainstorming!

« on: May 12, 2009, 05:18 AM »

My Win XP pro 32bit runs in PAE mode. I've not activated that manually and I think it was active even before I started trying out these ramdisk programs.

-Nod5 (May 12, 2009, 02:17 AM)

Interesting, I had to specifically enable it - then again, it's been some time since I installed this particular incarnation of my system and it was 4GB from the initial install, maybe I removed it, way, way back in the distant past.

5189

General Software Discussion / Re: RAMdisk on XP 32bit - brainstorming!

« on: May 11, 2009, 10:32 PM »

edbro: nice, I'm adding that to the list above. Do you know if it can use memory above 3.x GB in XP 32bit? The homepage and manual doesn't say anything about that so my guess is "no".

-Nod5 (May 11, 2009, 04:40 PM)

In the manual:

FAT     - Max 2GB
FAT32 - Max 4GB
NTFS   - Max. supported by the OS

These are filesystem limitations and wrt. NTFS, the maximum RAM supported by Windows 32bit is 3.x GB.  So I'd say definitely not.

Of course, the easy way to find out is probably just do 'My Computer->Properties' and see if Physical Address Extension appears under the amount of RAM - my take is that has to be enabled via the /PAE switch before any type of RamDisk will use the full 4GB.

f0dder, you have SuperSpeed - does it add that switch or use some other nefarious means ?

The main reason I like it is because it will automatically save the disk image at shudown or whenever you specify.

-edbro (May 11, 2009, 01:40 PM)

Good point, I was wondering how I could update my Firefox profile but I believe I could accomplish this using RoboCopy in the Logon/Logoff script area of Windows, (or perhaps SyncBackSE since it's running all the time).

5190

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« on: May 11, 2009, 09:11 PM »

While we're talking about filesystems - there's one that hasn't been mentioned yet: exFAT^w

As WikiPedia says: ...suited especially for flash drives...

Now I'm not sure whether they mean USB or flash drives in general but it can be read by XP (with Hotfix), Vista SP1 and Linux (free kernel module).

Implemented in Vista SP1, it's now available for XP SP2/3.

The XP driver is available from Microsoft here.

The only thing against it is that it is proprietary to Microsoft.

A search over at MSFN will show a lot of threads, mostly pertaining to USB flash drives.

EDIT: I found what seems to be the original article mentioned in MSFN forums but not referred to: Tech Recipes

The article is dated 28-Feb-2008 and I found that the paragraphs at the bottom possibly summed it up nicely:

Interestingly enough, exFAT is not used currently for formatting hard drives. It is being recommended in Flash memory storage and other external devices only. This is why it is currently not considered a huge competitor to NTFS on hard drives.

However, exFAT should be a true competitor to NTFS on systems with limited processing power and memory. NTFS on flash memory has been known to be inefficient for quite some time. exFAT’s smaller footprint/overhead makes it ideal for this purpose. Of course, only if your definition of “ideal” allows software to be proprietary and not open source.

Vista will happily read FAT, exFAT, and NTFS from flash. ReadyBoost may not work with exFAT formatted flash drives, however.

In conclusion, basically, FAT is a simple system. This limits FAT system by losing efficiency at large sizes, but allows it to run with less resources. The complexity of NTFS increases features but requires more memory and processing power.

5191

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« on: May 11, 2009, 06:37 AM »

To Kamel: I don't think so. In my experience when I reformatted a bunch of old HDs, which I'm using now as external via USB, from FAT32 to NTFS, I got an increase in performace 5 to 10 times faster, both reads and writes. This might not apply to SSD, of course.

-yksyks (May 11, 2009, 03:48 AM)

IIRC, from doing a lot of PE builds to flash drives, using FAT32 on an external USB drive isn't recommended because XP reads it slower than NTFS or FAT16.

The end result is if the drive is 2GB or smaller, use FAT16.  If it's bigger, use NTFS unless you need compatibility with another OS.

5192

General Software Discussion / Re: RAMdisk on XP 32bit - brainstorming!

« on: May 10, 2009, 09:08 PM »

4wd: great! I will try Gavotte once I upgrade.

Here's a translation of the forum page linked above (which seems to be the first page the author uses to post his updates to)
http://translate.goo...&history_state0=

If I understand that list correct there are two releases of the v1.4096.5. Which one are you running?

-Nod5 (May 10, 2009, 03:00 PM)

I'm running the one from here which is the first link on the wiki page I mention below.

BTW, here's a comment from Gameeer.com re. Gavotte:

Great utility. Highly recommended especially if you have 2GB of RAM installed. Easy to set up a RAMdisk, which is essentially a virtual hard drive using your free RAM. I use a 512MB RAMdisk to store my Windows Temp Files and internet browser cache files. Keep in mind that once you restart your PC, however, anything stored in the RAMdisk is purged (lost). For some reason cookie files remain intact after I reboot. This is a good thing IMHO, but haven't figured out why or how to NOT have it do this.

So, you get persistent cookies

Here's their article on setting up a RamDisk using Gavotte on the EeePC.  It doesn't take into account having RAM over 2GB of course but does tell you how to config IE, Firefox and Windows to use it for temp files.

We should make a list of releases and their MD5/SHA1 hashes. I share f0dders sentiments about the lack of an official website.

Here's the home site AFAICT, it's using a wiki page....but then again, so is a lot of other software.

That forum seems legit though but I'd be more comfortable if it was a program that was also carried by major download sites like filehippo.com .

Gavotte is also used by Boot Land on a lot of their WinPE type disks. Which are frequented by the likes of jaclaz who is well known on MSFN, UBCD4Win and others - I'm sure if there was something dodgy with it, the folks at Boot Land, WinImage, MSFN, WinBuilder, etc would have found out by now.

BTW, I rarely use major download sites, (a lot of the software I seem to use I find on a small home pages, wiki, forum, etc, hidden away somewhere), so I don't count being carried by the likes of Tucows, filehippo, (which I've only just looked at), SoftPedia, etc, as an advantage.

Boot Land forum sticky: RAMdisk and FILEdisk drivers  - EDIT: Ooppss!  I see you mentioned it in your post above but I failed to pick up on it without the thread title, so I'll leave it here to indicate what it's about.

5193

General Software Discussion / Re: RAMdisk on XP 32bit - brainstorming!

« on: May 10, 2009, 01:26 PM »

Just gave Gavotte a quick test and it looks like it does indeed use the space above 3.5GB, (or 3.25GB in my case).

Quick test:
1) Edit boot.ini to add the /pae switch.
2) Merge the ram4g.reg in the archive - do this first, there's a reason.
3) Run the ramdisk.exe program to install the RamDisk.

If you're using PAE then the name of the drive, (default R:), will be 'RamDisk+PAE'.  If you remove the RamDisk and then reinstall it again, then you will lose PAE mode, (the drive name becomes 'RamDisk'), because it wipes out all it's registry entries.  So you'll have to merge the ram4g.reg file in before you install it again.

My available RAM before creating a ramdisk was ~2770000 out of 3405228 according to TaskManager, I made a ramdisk of 1GB using PAE and my available RAM dropped by only 256MB to around 2500000 - the other 768MB being the part XP32 can't access.

I copied 1GB of files to it and the amount of available RAM stayed at ~2500000.

I then changed the size of the ramdisk to 768MB using ramdisk.exe and the name of the ramdisk changed to 'RamDisk-PAE' and the system got back 256MB.

I copied ~700MB and the system still had it's original ~2770000 out of 3405228 available, the RamDisk being completely in the PAE area this time.

I think I've found a use for that unseen 768MB

SuperSpeed ramdisk - but I'm on the lookout for an alternative... for whatever lame marketing reason, I'll have to get a new license when I move from XP to Vista/Win7. And the 64bit version is almost twice as expensive as the 32bit >_<

-f0dder (May 10, 2009, 07:45 AM)

Maybe you should give Gavotte a look, however, be warned that the 64bit version is twice the price of the 32bit version 

5194

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« on: May 10, 2009, 08:07 AM »

I'm still slightly skeptical wrt. the registry not being persisted, though.

-f0dder (May 10, 2009, 07:08 AM)

If it helps, think of it as a improved version of a WinPE, (or BartPE), CD - there's no need of a persistent registry since the system doesn't change.

After all, what registry changes are really stored when you have your system the way you want it?

Basically, any program setting changes, (for those that store them in the registry), and recent documents opened.

I honestly can't think of anything else that requires the registry be constantly updated.

How about the FlashPoint? Is it worth trying? Some speeding up would be nice, but the data reliability is the highest priority, you know.

-yksyks (May 09, 2009, 03:41 PM)

I tried it, it worked (except for a bug regarding chkdsk which has been fixed in the latest version), but gave me nowhere near the speed as my current setup does - which is to be expected, writing to RAM or the slow SSD - RAM is going to win.
With my current setup my data is as safe as yours would be, probably safer because it's not all on a drive that's being constantly written to.  Plus I can simply eject the SD card, toggle the Lock switch and plug it into a reader on another PC to transfer it without fear of accidentally deleting it.

Remember, FlashPoint is beta software so if you're not prepared to wear potential data loss then don't use it.

EDIT: Just another point about EWF/FBWF while I think of it: defragging - do it once, enable EWF, no need to do it again

5195

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« on: May 10, 2009, 06:52 AM »

I completely agree with both of you. EWF seems to me too dangerous. How about the FlashPoint? Is it worth trying? Some speeding up would be nice, but the data reliability is the highest priority, you know.

-yksyks (May 09, 2009, 03:41 PM)

Since we are talking about the Acer Aspire One, then I have experienced no data loss at all no matter how I've turned the machine off, or not commited changes, etc, etc.

For the simple reason is that I use the System Expansion SD card slot on the left for all my data, (there's a 4GB or 8GB SD card in there all the time).   That card is where 'My Documents' resides, where files are downloaded to, etc, etc.

EWF is only enforced on C:\ where the system and any programs are, portable or installed.  The programs and system are set up the way I want so I don't care if the system is turned off incorrectly - the only data lost is whatever the browser may have cached and other junk which isn't necessary for the running of the system.  The system boots in the same state it was the last time it was turned on, and the time before that, ad infinitum.

Unless I have committed changes to it - and that only happens when there's a new program install or I've changed settings in a program that I want to keep.

EWF is not dangerous providing you use it as it was intended.

I also use it as a cheap form of virus protection since any changes a virus makes to the system drive can be removed by just turning it off, (providing you haven't committed changes).

If, however, you are not prepared to use a separate means of saving your data, whether the SD card or dividing the SSD into two partitions and keeping your data on the second, (which you should do anyway), then yes, EWF is not for you.

In that case you could use FBWF with it's ability to specify some directories on the drive as writable even though the rest of the disk isn't.

5196

Living Room / Re: My daughter kind of stuck in France

« on: May 08, 2009, 11:52 PM »

Do any forum members have any ideas as to the best places to look on the internet or contacts for short term (but relatively cheap) accommodation in France?

-JeffK (May 08, 2009, 05:32 PM)

Craig's List for France?  Looks like you can get a room in Paris for around EUR400/month.

Hostels.com - I used them to find a hostel in Valparaiso, Chile, where we stayed a couple of months ago.

Trav - Used them to find a hostel in Cusco, Peru, a couple of months ago, (then booked through the hostel's own website).

Both the above sites have a user rating system which I based my decisions on and they turned out to be fairly accurate for the two places we stayed.

The problem will be you're going into high season.

5197

General Software Discussion / Re: RAMdisk on XP 32bit - brainstorming!

« on: May 08, 2009, 11:42 PM »

Ooops, just saw that 4wd was faster than me with posting.

-Shades (May 08, 2009, 11:13 PM)

At least we both beat f0dder for a change 

5198

General Software Discussion / Re: RAMdisk on XP 32bit - brainstorming!

« on: May 08, 2009, 10:19 PM »

6. Are there any other good RAM-disk applications for XP 32bit (especially freeware/FOSS version that are actively developed)?

-Nod5 (May 08, 2009, 05:59 AM)

Not sure about 'actively developed' but Gavotte Ramdisk, (Google translated Japanese), was last updated 30-11-2008 and reportedly can use the unavailable RAM that XP x86, (or Vista x86), can't touch, (although you'll still be limited to a ramdisk of 64.5GB).

Oh, did I mention it is free?

EDIT: Having had a quick look at it, it appears you need to enable the /PAE switch in boot.ini and then merge the reg file found in the archive which allows the driver to access memory in the PAE area.

5199

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« on: May 08, 2009, 09:30 PM »

I'm just not sure about the cluster size. Is it really so critical?

-yksyks (May 08, 2009, 01:58 PM)

I think that the default that Windows gives, (4kB for disks >2GB), is probably the best all-round compromise so I would leave it at that.

If you want to get really technical you could calculate an average, (as that is really all it is), as given here.

If you want to speed up your SSD access a bit you could also try FlashPoint SSD accelerator.  The forum discussion regarding its performance and any problems is here.

5200

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« on: May 08, 2009, 01:44 PM »

Recently I got my wife an Acer Aspire One notebook with WinXP, 1 GB RAM and 16 GB SSD. It's surprisingly nice little machine, especially with regard to its price (I got it for free when buying a lawn mower).

It was pre-installed and I'm surprised it has FAT32 file system. I've read many diverse and divergent articles, but it seems that converting to NTFS would be a good idea to speed it up a bit. But what about the cluster size? The only thing those articles seem to agree is that it's quite critical value for an SSD, but they don't give any unambiguous answer.

Does anyone here have any experience or piece of advice? Thanks in advance.

-yksyks (May 08, 2009, 06:01 AM)

NTFS is not a real good filesystem for SSDs, it does too much housekeeping, (ie. writes), which can reduce the life of them.

I also have an AAO, 512MB RAM, 8GB SSD Linpus originally, now 1.5GB RAM and running a much nlitened version of XP Pro.  The biggest speed up is by not having the thing write to the rather crappy SSD, (at least the 8GB is), in the first place.

See my post here about using Microsoft's Enhanced Write Filter to redirect system writes to RAM i.l.o. SSD.

If you're interested I'll elucidate further but right now it's 0440 and I'm off to bed.

Oh, a couple of good resources:
Aspire One User
macles*