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Recent Posts

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5026
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 08, 2008, 08:41 AM »
lanux128: yup, you can safely delete pagefile.sys without any problems, once you've turned it off.

nudone: it's pretty hard to benchmark the effects... especially if you have a lot of RAM and fast harddrives. I still feel better knowing that windows won't do any useless paging even if I can't feel much of a difference on my current machine... back when I only had 1 gig of RAM, more paging was done, and I had a slow(er) harddrive - I believe I could feel the difference there, under certain load scenarios. But I have no idea how you'd go about benchmarking a thing like this. (Sure, you can watch the pagefile usage statistics and draw graphs etc., but that doesn't tell you much about how much "perceived sluggishness" there is, unless the stats are really bad).
5027
General Software Discussion / Re: TrueCrypt 6.0 released
« Last post by f0dder on July 08, 2008, 08:35 AM »
Stoic Joker: doing the ADS thing only helps if you're trying to smuggle contraband - it's not feasible for regular data files that you need to use daily, programs, etc. If I had to go to the .us for work-related reasons, I'd have to bring a laptop full of reverse-engineering tools and other things that would probably look suspicious to customs. ADS wouldn't help me there, but a hidden OS partition would, since I could just boot an inconspicuous XP to sjov them that everything is hunky-dory.

Also, Justice's ADS link is outdated, with XP taskmgr was upgraded to show which stream of a file that's executed, so suddenly that trick stands out like a naked drag queen in the oval office. Or more, probably.

PS: encryption is only one of the benefits of VPNs - the main advantage is of course that you can refrain from punching any public holes through from the internet to your LAN, except for VPN... and still be able to access the LAN from home/whatever, as if you were inside your corporate building. Obviously you need strong password policies (and certificates for anything serious) for the VPN.
5028
Coding Snack Guidelines / Re: Email Notifier [ sys tray ]
« Last post by f0dder on July 08, 2008, 08:20 AM »
brotherS: distraction problem can be fixed by not having accounts checked every minute :P

A dedicated account checker is a bad idea, though, if you get any amount of spam at all. Better to switch to an email program that has decent notifications, and notifies you after running incoming mails through the spam filter.
5029
Living Room / Re: Show us your (physical) desktop
« Last post by f0dder on July 08, 2008, 08:14 AM »
Four monitors, whoa :o :o :o

There's a big problem with your workspace though, mouser - you've got virtually no arm resting place with that desk. Oh, and if that's an air conditioner to the left, it's probably not the smartest place to place the desk, easy to catch a cold if you sit near one of those things for longer periods.
5030
Coding Snacks / Re: Mailto Forwarder
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 05:35 PM »
Espresso is a mail client and is set as the default. The problem is that when clicking a Mailto: link, its compose window pops up without the To field filled. Somehow, its ignoring the info given via the %1 variable.
-Zero3K (July 07, 2008, 05:32 PM)
Ah... it sounds like you need to file a bug report to the Espresso people then, instead of requesting an app?
5031
Coding Snacks / Re: Mailto Forwarder
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 05:30 PM »
Still not sure I'm following you - is Espresso a mail client, and (if so) is it your system default client?

Or do you want to launch the system default client *and* pass the argument to espresso?
5032
Coding Snacks / Re: Mailto Forwarder
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 05:19 PM »
Ummm... "forwards"? Do you mean sending to multiple applications? Or do you just need to change the mailto: handler to something that isn't Outlook Express? :)
5033
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 03:12 PM »
Heh, especially considering they have their own "proprietary virtual memory technology", it's even more silly it won't run without a windows pagefile :P
5034
DC Gamer Club / Re: Will someone in this section please start creating a massive MMORPG
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 11:41 AM »
How about a MUD with realtime scripting, so you can add new items/monsters without recompiling sourcecode & restarting the server? Yeah, I know I know, everybody wants graphics today :(
5035
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 11:40 AM »
tomos: it simply refuses to run without, even though you have plenty of RAM? Interesting... and what a silly limitation to impose :)
5036
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 09:56 AM »
ah ok maybe someone needs to write an Xp Myths Myths page then.
-justice (July 07, 2008, 09:40 AM)
Basically did that in that thread ;), and it ended up very heated... probably the only thread I've seen on DC that became uncomfortable.
5037
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 09:39 AM »
justice: we already had a DC thread about that "XP Myths" page... basically, the guy only almost knows what he's talking about.

Virtual memory, as in using a paging file, is not always in use. On XP and later, you can disable the pagefile (but not on win2k and previous). However, it's obvious why you can get a bit confused about matters, since you cannot (when running windows) turn off the x86 protect-mode feature called "paging". Which is related to (and used by) disk paging, but does not imply it.
5038
General Software Discussion / Re: TrueCrypt 6.0 released
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 08:13 AM »
justice: you'd notice it yourself because your partitions would obviously be resized :) - obviously the reason for something like this is those insane border patrol laptop searches. Now you can boot a clean XP install and let the customs people rummage through the drive, and keep all your NDA'ed work documents and client records safe in the hidden OS, without being retained for not giving up your decryption keys.
5039
General Software Discussion / Re: TrueCrypt 6.0 released
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 06:55 AM »
Full system drive encryption was introduced with 5.x, but parallelized en/decryption sounds very nice. I haven't had problems saturating my disk bandwidth in previous versions, but I guess it could come in handy when copying from one encrypted disk to another; one core on my Q6600@3GHz can do around 106MB/s, and moving between two disks that can handle 60MB/s sustained transfer would require 120MB/s of en/decryption bandwidth :)

Thanks for the heads-up, 40hz, I guess it's also time for me to add truecrypt.org to website watcher.
5040
DC Gamer Club / Re: Will someone in this section please start creating a massive MMORPG
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 06:49 AM »
A MMORPG is a pretty massive undertaking, though, even if you go for something in the simpler end like maplestory. Heck, even going simpler and designing a text-based MUD isn't a super-trivial task...
5041
Living Room / Re: Simply Google
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 06:41 AM »
I wouldn't call "Simply Google" simple at all. "Direct Google" would be a better name for it, imho. Which might be useful if you use many of those tools, but for plain search simplicity I certainly prefer the standard uncluttered google page :)
5042
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 06:30 AM »
Interesting! I keep FF2 open from when I boot to when I shut down and I never ran into that. I've got a ton of add-ons active and Sage RSS Reader is permanently open. My FF2 memory usage fluctuates between 135 and 200 Mb no matter what. Does Facebook (which I don't use) have something to do with that?
-40hz (July 06, 2008, 10:54 PM)
Facebook is definitely very ill-behaved :) - after several hours of use, it could take up to 30-40 seconds from clicking a link in facebook until the page was loaded... and that with full browser freeze until the loading was done. The browser would also generally be affected, things like opening new tabs would be pretty slow etc.

But the optimized JavaScript engine and the lovely new memory allocator (as well as lots of fixed leaks and improved garbage collection) in FF3 has taken care of most of this. Sure, After 12+ hours of use, the memory usage can creep to 300+ megabytes. But facebook no longer slows to a crawl. Also, on FF2 right after a clean boot, opening new tabs would become slowly but steadily (and noticeably) slower - when clicking 10+ forum notify emails, opening the last tabs (or just new blank tabs with ctrl+t) could take perhaps up to ~300ms or more. FF3 has also fixed this.
5043
DC Gamer Club / Re: Diablo 3 announced!
« Last post by f0dder on July 07, 2008, 06:23 AM »
Isn't running such high resolutions somewhat close to cheating? I mean, you can see much more than you were normally supposed to, and perhaps can even see monsters without being inside their detection range? (unless the game actually does adapt to higher resolutions).
5044
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 09:15 PM »
if you can play Mass Effect with WLM in the tray, then i'd call it a success. :up: Firefox is generally well-behaved on my system so i'm going to disable the swap file after concluding some tasks ahead. ;)
-lanux128 (July 06, 2008, 09:11 PM)
Do keep in mind that this is on an 8-gig system - but process explorer didn't report more than ~1.5gig physical memory usage.

FF3 is well-behaved, FF2 was a real bloody mess after more than just a few hours... after 8 hours of having facebook more or less constantly running in the background, as well as opening and closing various forum tabs, and checking news from RSS feeds (at least a couple of times an hour on a regular day), FF2 by itself would usually end up consuming 1.3+ gigs of ram :p
5045
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 09:05 PM »
thanks f0dder, you've convinced me to take advantage of the 2GB RAM on my system.
-lanux128 (July 06, 2008, 08:52 PM)
You can always give it a try and see how it works out for you :) - if you get into a low-memory situation, you'll get a messagebox from windows nagging about low memory, and you can add a pagefile without having to reboot (disabling pagefiles require reboot though). Do keep in mind that not all applications handle a failure to allocate memory gracefully, but with 2 gigs of ram that shouldn't happen under normal circumstances.

Even after having firefox3 running for 8-10 hours, windows live messenger, a bunch of the usual tray-icon stuff and playing Mass Effect (one of those pretty resource-heavy modern games), my physical memory utilization peaked out at about 1.5gigs. And after exiting back to desktop, the nice thing with no pagefile is that everything is smooth right away, without any paging activity going on.

Success will obviously depend on what you're doing, though. You probably can't expect to run a couple of vmware OSes, photoshop, premiere, visual studio, folding@home, firefox2-after-12-hours and a 3D shooter at the same time with 2 gigs of ram and no paging file... ;) 8) :P
5046
General Software Discussion / Re: Queueing downloads in firefox
« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 08:20 AM »
The built-in download engine in FireFox3 has had a number of improvements compared to FF2, namely that it's now able to resume downloads. I don't think you can do queing per se, but at least you can (manually :-\ ) pause some of your downloads right after adding...

Personally I use flashget, the "classic version", when I need to download large stuff (several-hundred megabytes) - does a pretty decent job. It doesn't do pre-allocation of files, though, so big downloads are usually horribly fragmented.
5047
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 08:14 AM »
tomos: the application minidumps (ie., a standard program that crashes and fires up DrWatson) don't require pagefile - only the BSOD-produced dumps.
5048
Delphi and C++ Builder / Re: Something you should know about C++ Builder
« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 08:07 AM »
If you just want Delphi, check out this link, there's a "buy now" button. There's also the "RAD Studio" which includes C++ builder and Delphi dotNET as well, the pro version is about 5x more expensive than just Delphi, though... and the "enterprise" and "architect" versions are even worse :)
5049
General Software Discussion / Re: Does it make sense to disable the windows swap file?
« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 08:00 AM »
Not everybody needs minidumps, though - especially considering most users don't know how to diagnose them. And they only happen on BSODs anyway, so on a well-working computer... you're not even going to see them. Dunno if you need a 64meg pagefile for that though, a minidump itself is only 64kbyte (128kbyte for 64bit windows).

The problem with pagefile on windows is that it tends to page out stuff even when it doesn't need to. I go by the principle that unused RAM is wasted RAM, while windows seems to prefer trimming working sets even when there's still plenty of free RAM - and this means paging stuff out to disk. Paging out and reading back in is slow.

With one gigabyte RAM, I had to re-enable pagefile temporarily every now and then, I had a few games that would crash otherwise. But with 2 gigs and up, I've never faced an out-of-memory situation, even though I've been running a lot of fairly memory-hungry applications at the same time (visual studio, vmware, et cetera).

How much or how little performance you gain by disabling the pagefile might be a bit of a religious issue - the system "feels a bit smoother", but nothing I can quantize, really. But knowing that I get less disk writes is a nice feeling.
5050
Found Deals and Discounts / Re: a-squared Anti-Malware 50% Discount
« Last post by f0dder on July 06, 2008, 06:44 AM »
Hmm, does that URL have referrer stuff hidden in it?
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