Recent Posts

5201

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

« Last post by 4wd 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 

5202

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« Last post by 4wd 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

5203

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« Last post by 4wd 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.

5204

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

« Last post by 4wd 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.

5205

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

« Last post by 4wd 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 

5206

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

« Last post by 4wd 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.

5207

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« Last post by 4wd 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.

5208

Living Room / Re: SSD File System Recommendations

« Last post by 4wd 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*

5209

General Software Discussion / Re: Space Management : there is a new competitor - SpaceSniffer

« Last post by 4wd on May 08, 2009, 01:28 PM »

I guess I subscribe to a "looser" definition of portable. I should have said, "it runs fine from a flash drive." Thanks for the correction.

-ayryq (May 08, 2009, 11:41 AM)

No, I'd say you're definition of portable is correct, however the program is not 'stealthy' - it leaves traces behind.

5210

General Software Discussion / Re: Converting the middle/wheel click to drag-n-drop

« Last post by 4wd on May 07, 2009, 11:27 PM »

In the Mouse control panel you can turn on ClickLock which will take care of having to hold down the LMB to drag'n'drop.



That will leave only leave DBLCLK to take care of.

For which they could:
a) just single click on an icon to highlight, then hit Enter, or
b) turn on MouseKeys in Accessibilty which will then simulate a DBLCLK by pushing the '+' on the numpad, or
c) turn on 'Single click to open an item' under Folder Options.

5211

Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 18-09

« Last post by 4wd on May 03, 2009, 07:24 PM »

4. It's good to see that the EU is also bending over to allow their citizens to be well and truly shafted by corporate greed.

5. Am I missing the point here?

Surely the difference is that TPB actually provides the torrent files that enable the downloading of the copyrighted material, (although from what I remember reading of all this, the torrent files themselves aren't illegal since they're only hash values and pointers not actually copyrighted data).

Whereas Google doesn't host anything, they merely point to a site that does.

7. Still waiting for any form of holographic storage for consumers, they've been making the damn things for more than 4 years now.  (Not to mention waiting for citywide maglev trains.)

5212

Living Room / Re: Recommend to me the BEST USB stick to get

« Last post by 4wd on May 02, 2009, 08:43 PM »

The actual OCZ Throttle speed review was done here, but I think they only tested it with the USB connection.  Either way, i doubt even esata actually achieves those speeds.

-superboyac (May 02, 2009, 08:43 AM)

If they're going to test a Flash Drive then they should test all it's interfaces, especially since eSATA is getting to be rather common these days.

BTW, USB performance as I recently discovered upon a visit to a friends place, seems to be mainly a function of the chipset used.

For my external 2.5" HDD I can consistently get 20MB/s writing and around 25-30MB/s reading on my current ATI based board and my previous ULi based board.

One of my friends PCs consistently produced 50-60MB/s reading and 40MB/s writing, pretty much double what I could previously get, and it's motherboard was an old nForce3-250 based SKT939.

Just goes to show I should never have got rid of my old nForce3-250 board.  I'll have to try it with one of my Flash drives next time.

Anyway, the point is unless you know what manufacturers' use to get their "figures" and what the reviewers use to get their "figures" then who's to say the manufacturers' figures are incorrect?

And yes, I know in the link you reference they specify the motherboard but quite a lot don't.

5213

Living Room / Re: Recommend to me the BEST USB stick to get

« Last post by 4wd on May 02, 2009, 06:10 AM »

While trawling the net looking at SSDs I happened across this flash drive:  OCZ Throttle eSATA Flash Drive

For eSATA:
90MB/s - Read
30MB/s - Write

And a USB interface if the host PC doesn't have an eSATA port.

The 16GB version is available at Newegg for $52.

Now we're getting to some realistic speeds 

5214

General Software Discussion / Re: Rubber Ducky - a small, fun resource monitor

« Last post by 4wd on May 02, 2009, 05:48 AM »

(Hey, I'll take any excuse to get Milla Jovovich's lovely visage on my screen. )

-40hz (April 30, 2009, 08:51 PM)

In that case I would have thought you'd go for the changing clothes scene from The Fifth Element...................then again, imagine how many CPUs you'd burn out 

5215

General Software Discussion / Re: Is AnyDVD actually necessary for copying DVD's?

« Last post by 4wd on May 02, 2009, 03:03 AM »

And while we're speaking of doing naughty things with copyrighted material, I see Give Away Of The Day has a DVD copying program up for grabs  today

5216

Living Room / Re: Interesting Discovery Involving Rented Servers

« Last post by 4wd on May 01, 2009, 02:30 AM »

Windows XP includes a command that will do what you want, (also available to Win2000):

cipher

Administrators can use Cipher.exe to encrypt and decrypt data on drives that use the NTFS file system and to view the encryption status of files and folders from a command prompt. An updated version of the Cipher tool has been released for Windows 2000, and is included with Windows XP. The updated version adds another security option. This new option is the ability to overwrite data that you have deleted so that it cannot be recovered and accessed.

eg.  cipher /w:C:\  should wipe all unused space on the C: drive.

Otherwise there's always DBAN.

5217

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for a text editor that can colorize text

« Last post by 4wd on May 01, 2009, 01:48 AM »

What about SciTE ?

Both Notepad++ and Notepad2 are based on it and both it and they have code highlighting which is rule based I believe.

Also, PSPad allows you to edit the highlighter settings.

-4wd (May 01, 2009, 01:24 AM)

Speaking of Scite.. do you happen to know how to bring up an ahk script without folding?  Most of my scripts are 2 screens so I really don't need them folded.  Drives me nuts to have to open the menu and hit the Toggle All Folds every time I open a script. (If I can sneak in a tech support question here)

-MilesAhead (May 01, 2009, 01:32 AM)

The only time I use SciTE is for AutoIT scripts and they always open fully unfolded.

Found it:  Edit Global Options and change 'fold.on.open=1' to 'fold.on.open=0'

That should fix it......I think.

5218

General Software Discussion / Re: Is AnyDVD actually necessary for copying DVD's?

« Last post by 4wd on May 01, 2009, 01:40 AM »

@4wd check out DVD Rebuilder

-MilesAhead (May 01, 2009, 01:23 AM)

You're right, I forgot that one.

I rarely re-encode MPEG2 to MPEG2, (in fact I can't remember the last time), mostly I go MPEG2 -> MPEG4.

However, both HC Enc and QuEnc don't seem to be updated that often.
I prefer to use ffmpeg, mencoder (which is ffmpeg based anyway) or Avidemux's LAVC encoder, all of which are multi-threaded so that kind of nullifies any advantage of DVD Rebuilder's method.

5219

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for a text editor that can colorize text

« Last post by 4wd on May 01, 2009, 01:24 AM »

What about SciTE ?

Both Notepad++ and Notepad2 are based on it and both it and they have code highlighting which is rule based I believe.

Also, PSPad allows you to edit the highlighter settings.

5220

General Software Discussion / Re: Is AnyDVD actually necessary for copying DVD's?

« Last post by 4wd on May 01, 2009, 01:13 AM »

Carol is right about the shrinking process that DVDshrink uses.

-Shades (April 30, 2009, 10:14 PM)

The only thing is, it's not just DVD Shrink that uses that process.

CloneDVD, DVDFab, Nero Recode and virtually every other 'all-in-one' type of DVD9 -> DVD5 shrinking program do it by just knocking the crap out of the bitrate for every frame.

I can't off-hand think of one that uses a MPEG2 encoder to do the job properly.

So why pay for software that does no better than what's available free?

5221

General Software Discussion / Re: Is AnyDVD actually necessary for copying DVD's?

« Last post by 4wd on April 30, 2009, 08:24 PM »

programs like DVDShrink and DVD43 shrink dual layer discs to single layer size by recoding the video content and so reducing the visual quality.

-Carol Haynes (April 30, 2009, 07:47 PM)

DVD43 doesn't shrink anything - it's a filter, exactly the same as AnyDVD.

And you don't have to lose quality in DVD Shrink, just set the output size to DVD9 for a dual layer DVD and it will just copy the files sans encryption, (exactly the same as CloneDVD or DVDFab will do).

There are other alternatives for copying DVDs which work very easily - DVDFab is one. With DVDFab if you have two drives all you have to do is place the original in on drive and a blank in the other, click a button and go away for a cup of coffee. It also lets you shrink dual layer to single layer  and/or remove regional encoding if you like and if you buy the extra addon it will format video for your iPod or other media player.

DVDFab costs money if you want to do on-the-fly copying, IIRC.  The free version will only backup to a HDD directory.

I'm sure copying protected DVDs is illegal in most countries these days ...

Except possibly Finland where CSS was deemed 'ineffective' by the courts.

Then again, I just realised you said 'most' so ignore me 

5222

General Software Discussion / Re: Rubber Ducky - a small, fun resource monitor

« Last post by 4wd on April 30, 2009, 08:01 PM »

I still like the old System Load indicator from my Amiga days.

It was called Flynn and basically it was the animated face of the main character from Doom who sat on Workbench, (Desktop equivalent), and looked left/right, etc but when the load started to get heavy he progressively got more bloody and haggard.

5223

General Software Discussion / Re: Is AnyDVD actually necessary for copying DVD's?

« Last post by 4wd on April 30, 2009, 07:15 PM »

A free alternative to AnyDVD is DVD43 which works in the same way - not as updated as AnyDVD so any really recent copy protection scheme will probably confound it, (and basically there really is only one DVD copy protection that can be still be considered active and that's Sony's ARccOS as f0dder mentioned).

I still use RipIt4Me if I need to cop backup a DVD.

It's just a front end to DVDDecrypter but it was the first to actually scan through the structure of a DVD and modify the command structure to make the DVD jump to the first menu upon insertion into a player, (so you missed all the "forced" advertising).  It also mapped out what 'cells' weren't used, or were small and bypassed those, (eg. FBI warning, etc).

Sadly, not developed any more, (it was Australian and got stomped on by Sony IIRC), but I've yet to find something it won't backup.  The website was taken taken down but you can still find it out in the wild using a search.

5224

General Software Discussion / Re: Virtual text printer?

« Last post by 4wd on April 30, 2009, 02:29 AM »

Why not just use an online converter?

Zamzar
Media Convert

And yes, I have used these to convert PDF -> Text as well as other conversions.

And yes, I did find them using the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Google, (oh the shame, the shame  ).

5225

Living Room / Re: Hard drive cooler: I need one (badly) - recommendations?

« Last post by 4wd on April 29, 2009, 07:28 PM »

Currently, I doubt whether the drives are getting any benefit of that 120mm fan at the front - first it's got to try and push air through a grill that looks to have a 40:60 ratio of metal to opening, then the drive cage itself has really nothing in the way of openings along the side to allow the air to flow through.

You're probably achieving very little, (other than generating more noise), by having that fan.

A simple solution for more air flow over the drives:

1) Remove the drive cage, most likely held by a couple of screws and clips.
2) Mount it on the base of the case with the long axis of the drives aligned front/back.  If the case doesn't get moved then you can use double-sided foam tape of about 2mm thick, (use a decent one like 3M, not some cheap chinese knockoff).  If the case does get moved around, drill a couple of holes and screw the cage down.
3) Use a piece of double-sided foam tape to mount a 80mm fan in front of the cage so that it blows air over the drives.  Hold the top of the fan in place by a metal strap to the top of the drive cage, (use tape there too).

All up, about 15 minutes work that will increase airflow over the drives by about 400%, since they aren't getting much now.

If the fan intake is mounted within 25mm of the front of the case then it's advisable to cut a big square hole in the metalwork in front of it, (purely so as not to restrict airflow and make it work harder), otherwise just blowing the internal case air over the drives will be OK since they are by far the hottest thing in there.

I would also seriously consider removing the metalwork that passes for the rear fan grill so it's not being restricted.