Recent Posts

3601

General Software Discussion / Re: Sysinternals PageDefrag: Good, Bad?

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2009, 06:29 PM »

Get enough RAM and turn off the pagefile entirely - voila, problem solved

3602

Living Room / Re: Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2009, 06:27 PM »

Kinda cute - I find it a bit scary that people fall for this

3603

Living Room / Re: Should I switch from xp to vista?

« Last post by f0dder on April 10, 2009, 06:22 PM »

If it works on Vista64, it'll likely work just fine on XP64 as well...

3604

Developer's Corner / Re: Turning off Direct Draw acceleration

« Last post by f0dder on April 09, 2009, 07:38 AM »

I don't think it's a good idea doing it programmatically. Sure, sucks having to ask your users to do it manually, but stil...

3605

Living Room / Re: Should I switch from xp to vista?

« Last post by f0dder on April 09, 2009, 07:37 AM »

Why are you considering switching? Is XP64 giving you problems?

Personally, XP64 does the job fine. If my machine crashed today, I'd probably install Vista64 on it, though. But if it doesn't, which I kinda hope , my next upgrade will be Win7-64.

3606

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2009, 07:53 PM »

3607

General Software Discussion / Re: Name The Best UNZIPPER!

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2009, 10:47 AM »

I use winrar all the time. THe user interface is not pretty, but it does its job when needed.

-Coeluh (April 07, 2009, 10:29 AM)

IMHO it's clean and uncluttered... and after a bit of preference customization, I like it even more

3608

DC Gamer Club / Re: Gothic 2 mod team looking for help with English translations

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2009, 10:26 AM »

I wonder why people keep doing non-English stuff in these intarweb days? It kinda offends me a bit, even though I'm not a native English speaker.

3609

Living Room / Re: Moar lightsabers plz

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2009, 08:57 AM »

 

3610

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: For mac user, Macheist 3. more than 10 apps for $39 only

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2009, 08:26 AM »

Is that a referrer link I spot there?

3611

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by f0dder on April 07, 2009, 08:21 AM »

Loved that one, Eóin

3612

General Software Discussion / Re: How much trouble is a 64-bit OS right now?

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2009, 09:05 AM »

I wonder if really win 64 is a wise decision.

-urlwolf (April 06, 2009, 09:00 AM)

It is

The Visual Studio Express editions are free, and while they iirc don't come with x64 compilers, you can get those from the PlatformSDK. Sure, there's a lot of closed-source libraries that aren't available in x64 form... but then again, there's a lot of opensource code that doesn't compile cleanly for x64 as well.

But really, if your applications don't need 64-bit, why port them? Most applications gain zero advantages whatsoever from a recompile, they only become (slightly) bigger and consume (slightly) more memory.

3613

Living Room / Re: What's the best registry cleaner? Ask Leo says: none

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2009, 04:29 AM »

Phil: doesn't have google hits for any full sentences and URL doesn't have referrer links...

* f0dder shrugs.

3614

General Software Discussion / Re: Should I get my new laptop with hard drive partitioned?

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2009, 04:21 AM »

4wd: if you want to protect your data against sector errors, you really want it on a separate physical drive, not just a partition on the same drive.

3615

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 For Free - Powerful but controversial

« Last post by f0dder on April 06, 2009, 04:19 AM »

MilesAhead: Windows' built-in defragger isn't very good, it's pathetic at dealing with low free diskspace situations. On Vista, they admittedly don't try to optimize beyond "keeping fragments at least 64MB in size" which kinda makes sense for regular Joe where an auto-scheduled defrag shouldn't be too disk-intensive. But consumer drives are way faster than 64MB/s today, and having to move the read/write heads is an awful speed hit.

Shades: I was referring to their NTFS compression scam, not the benefits of defragmenting. Imho the art of defragmenting is somewhat black magic, though... for instance, the access pattern while loading applications isn't necessarily linear, so you could probably gain more by grouping by read pattern than moving to the outer edge of the disk.

I'm so looking forward to cheap SSDs

3616

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 For Free - Powerful but controversial

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2009, 06:55 PM »

Perfect Disk works fine for me - I have even defragged a disk with less than 1% free without problem.

-Carol Haynes (April 05, 2009, 06:46 PM)

Works fine for me (although I always have a few gigabytes free before defragmenting - if I know there's a bunch of temporary files (or stuff I can burn out to DVDs, etc) on a partition, I always do that before defragmenting).

PD does seem to be a bit slow wrt. NTFS compressed files, though - I'm not sure they're as much of a performance improvement () as DiskTrix claimed - especially because they very easily get fragmented. Oh well

3617

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 For Free - Powerful but controversial

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2009, 06:13 PM »

I'd personally (probably) never use any software by DiskTrix.

Anybody remember the trick they pulled with "WE OMG KNOW SUPER SECRET TRIX TO MAKES YOUR XP 500% FASTERER! BUY NOW!" ntfs compression scam? And the user interface giving you the impression that they actually do some über-special physical placement and know disk layout is bordering ludicrous, imho.

Shades: AFAIK, the "15%" is just a rule of thumb, not a hard limit. And it's my feeling that the important thing isn't really 15% but has more to do with the size of the files on the disk, to avoid thrashing too much by moving stuff back and forth. But sure, while all NT defrag applications use the same defrag API, they can go about planning in different ways.

3618

Find And Run Robot / Re: Runtime Error!

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2009, 06:05 PM »

Hmm, if you aren't using any plugins you shouldn't be getting a "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library", considering that FARR is written in Borland C++ Builder (does FARR come with any standard plugins enabled? I haven't downloaded a new version for a while).

3619

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Clearing up Windows temp files

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2009, 06:01 PM »

Garbage collection is really a feature of .NET (and other programming platforms), not XP... and it isn't just a feature for "beginning programmers"

3620

Finished Programs / Re: RESTART PROGRAM AFTER CRASH

« Last post by f0dder on April 05, 2009, 05:59 PM »

Well then, what is "crash" defined as then? Not closing using "X" button? It would be impossible to figure out whether a user is using the File>Exit button though, as that usually just closes everything then self-terminates.

-Hello71 (April 05, 2009, 04:01 PM)

In my terminology, crash means crash - a program getting terminated by the OS because it executes invalid code. This can be detected, as I wrote earlier, by interfacing with the just-in-time debugger interface.

3621

General Software Discussion / Re: Against ellipsis ... (dot dot dot)

« Last post by f0dder on April 04, 2009, 05:49 AM »

I personally like ellipsis - if I can't have the full amount of information, I'd much rather have an indication that parts are missing. It's not like three characters carry a lot of useful entropy if there's another 100 missing. When dealing with stuff like filenames, I tend to insert the ellipsis in the middle, though.

3622

Living Room / Re: OS Re-install Tips?

« Last post by f0dder on April 03, 2009, 07:37 AM »

Have you tried Nlite? is a program that can help you put drivers, updates and hotfixes into a Windows XP installation disc. It can save lot's of installation time if used corectly.

-gexecuter (April 02, 2009, 01:29 PM)

I did a slipstreamed CD install last time using http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/

It worked great and I didn't have to spend hours updating XP!

Takes a bit of learning but it's not Brain Surgery...

-CleverCat (April 03, 2009, 04:05 AM)

You can use RyanVM's packs with nLite, making it a no-brainer

He has both post-SP2 and post-SP3 packs. Iirc there's a few more things to SP3 than just "all the hotfixes since SP2", but not sure exactly what.

BTW you can slipsteam SP2 or SP3 yourself from a vanilla XP CD (or you can slipstream SP3 on a SP2 CD).

3623

Living Room / Re: Old-School software archive

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2009, 10:15 PM »

Looking for that old Castle Wolfenstein demo? Some Impulse Tracker music? ASCII art straight outta BBS-Land circa 1985?

-Edvard (April 02, 2009, 10:59 AM)

That sentence took me on a trip down nostalgia lane

3624

ProcessTamer / Re: Bug with the "below normal" , "above normal" , "real time" priorities

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2009, 10:14 PM »

 

3625

Living Room / Re: OS Re-install Tips?

« Last post by f0dder on April 02, 2009, 10:09 PM »

Oh, with XP you can create a slipstream CD from a live install, rather than an ISO image? didn't know that, and don't know of a workaround for Vista.