Recent Posts

6826

Living Room / Re: $7.5 to optimize XP NTFS Drive access : rip-off or not ?

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2007, 07:53 AM »

It would make sense anyway, they claim "Improve Your Hard Drive File Access Performance By 40% to 500%" which is quite a broad range... guess what, compression ratio (and thus the decrease in HDD access time) depends on the content of the files...

I've tried registering at MSFN to do a backlink to this thread on donationcoder, but unfortunately my mail host is down atm. so I can't confirm the account creation, doh >_<

6827

Living Room / Re: $7.5 to optimize XP NTFS Drive access : rip-off or not ?

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2007, 06:55 AM »

Well, I'm convinced that it's NTFS compression, direct quotes from the webpage and the PDF teaser (emphasis is mine):

And it's a feature that is normally disabled but which you can turn on in Vista, XP, 2000, NT, 2003 with a couple clicks of your mouse.
and from the PDF:

-disktrix scamsters

In fact it is quite a prominent feature in any operating system that supports the NT File System. However, when it was originally implemented into NTFS it was acutally deemed to reduce hard drive performance. This was because NTFS and this particular feature of NTFS was conceived at the time when a 300 MHz processor was considered state of the art.

-disktrix scamsters

It's really low demanding money for something like this, whatever it is.

6828

Post New Requests Here / Re: [REQ] Keyboard locale auto-switcher?

« Last post by f0dder on September 03, 2007, 06:50 AM »

Upon startup is fine, since local settings are stored per process - I can have notepad++ running with english layout and the rest of the system with danish, and when I alt+tab windows itself handles setting the locale.

And there should definitely be API calls to change locale. I just wondered if there was some smart built-in way to do it all automagically

6829

Living Room / Re: $7.5 to optimize XP NTFS Drive access : rip-off or not ?

« Last post by f0dder on September 02, 2007, 03:13 PM »

I've always had a bad feeling about those folks, including the marketing hype about their "ultimate"defrag. Cash to "reveal secret information"? Christ. I don't think it's the DisableLastAccess thing though (which is nice!), since that didn't "use to degrade performance".

Perhaps they're going to tell you to turn off DMA and set the drive to PIO mode? *laugh*. Or perhaps it's LargeSystemCache, which is pretty decent, but has nothing to do with CPU speed and everything to do with RAM.

But then again, neither of those are "NTFS features".

EDIT: oh wait, processor speed. NTFS compression? It does reduce the amount of I/O done, and is pretty cheap processor-wise these days.

6830

Living Room / starfish: walking self-conscious robot

« Last post by f0dder on September 02, 2007, 06:29 AM »

Pretty interesting stuff... still needs a lot of work before it becomes very usable, but nonetheless...


http://www.technovel...News.asp?NewsNum=823
http://www.technovel...News.asp?NewsNum=830

6831

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alterna

« Last post by f0dder on September 02, 2007, 06:03 AM »

Well, you're obviously a convert - good for you

It just doesn't work for me, I like my explorer to be LEAN_AND_MEAN (xplorer2 weighs in at ~780kb uncompressed) and fast... and without a lot of stupid copy protection running in the background that isn't a problem for the crackers anyway, but stops me from un-UPX'ing the executable (and yes, that does matter when having multiple open TC windows launches a full new process).

6832

Post New Requests Here / Re: [REQ] Keyboard locale auto-switcher?

« Last post by f0dder on September 02, 2007, 05:48 AM »

lanux, those apps seem to be intended for inserting special accents... what I really need is the entire key layout to change... a small example: with DK layout, I need to press AltGr+{7,8,9,0} to get the "{[]}" characters - with a US layout I get [] simply by pressing the two keys right of P, and if I hold shift while pressing them, I get {}.

Compare Danish layout to US layout.

6833

Living Room / Re: download all updates for XP in one go?

« Last post by f0dder on September 02, 2007, 05:40 AM »

Hm, appearantly RyanVM updatepack and wud are still up... how come those haven't been shut down if Microsoft are so triggerhappy? :s

6834

Living Room / Re: Show us your (physical) desktop

« Last post by f0dder on September 02, 2007, 05:37 AM »

Grmbl, they're going to add Macrovision to sound now as well?

It really makes me wonder, they should've realized that Macrovision on video has not stopped a single pirate, and only makes fair use for the end-user harder. Why the bloody fsck can't the media industry wake up and smell the coffee?

Sure thing, they're greedy... but you don't have to be an ignorant stupid dumbfsck just because you're greedy! (I'm a prime example of that :p)

6835

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alterna

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 05:41 PM »

I don't see the point of having a lot of non-file-management functionality crammed into a file manager. I can see how archive handling and ftp support can be useful to some (though I prefer separate applications for that myself), but things like uninstall, registry editing, etc? Why?!

Yeah, it might give bragging rights, but imho it's silly.

EDIT: at least total commander does start relatively fast, even though it's a bloated 2.7meg (uncompressed) executable... but of course it bitches about being modified after I decompressed it with UPX. Silly software author.

6836

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Keyboard locale auto-switcher?

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 11:08 AM »

[REQ] Keyboard locale auto-switcher?

I don't know if Windows has built-in functionality for this, or if there's perhaps some freeware utility available that does it; if not, I expect it to be a relatively quick hackjob in autohotkey/whatever, if somebody has the time - I'm unfortunately pretty tied up myself :/

Now, for the problem description: I run an English XP with Danish local - no problems there, I can use my quirky æøåÆØÅ letters without having the OS language butchered translated. However, when coding, I prefer an English keyboard layout, because the various chars used in C++ have a better mapping that way.

I have both Danish and English locale installed, and it's as easy as ALT+SHIFT to toggle... but it's annoying that I _have_ to do this every time I start notepad++ or cmd.exe, and ALT+SHIFT can be a bit hard to hit properly sometimes.

So, my idea: automatically setting keyboard locale on application startup. Doable?

6837

General Software Discussion / Re: Searching a "Filesystem based event trigger tool"

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 10:57 AM »

Hm, interesting idea actually - coding a utility for this should be pretty simple, even in something as lowlevel as C++ & win32 api.

It could be pretty useful if it had some rule-based watching, in a configurable format... like, in your example...

Code: Text [Select]

1. <watch folder="c:\downloads\music">
2.   <filter mask="*.flac" action="flac2mp3.exe %FILEPATH% c:\new-mp3" />
3.   <filter mask="*.ape" action="ape2mp3.exe %FILEPATH% c:\new-mp3" />
4. </watch>
5. <watch folder="c:\downloads\receipts">
6.   <filter mask="*.pdf" action="MyFancyPrint.exe %FILEPATH%" />
7. </watch>

6838

General Software Discussion / Re: Data recovery software suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 08:17 AM »

Well, I'd have to find an IDE drive big enough to fit in my (sucky) USB enclosure, or buy an adapter... it's more fun (and cheaper and a bit faster, considering it's saturday and computer shops are closed ) writing the image-transferring software myself... and it might come in handy some other time.

Once I have the image file on my workstation I can use "whatever" to work on the image file, but I doubt any of the standard tools will work, since the filesystem metadata has been overwritten. Raw searching for text data should work, though, if there is anything left.

Thanks for your suggestions, nevertheless

6839

General Software Discussion / Re: Data recovery software suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 06:50 AM »

Problem is that I can't really install a new drive or move the other drive to another box, since it's a laptop drive I need to image... so I'm doing my own TCP/IP imaging thingamajig. I've already wrote the receiving end and tested it (<3 netcat), now I need to write the sending end. I've also made ~132gig free on my workstation, but I plan to use a sparse file for the image, since large parts of the laptop drive was - hopefully - empty.

Once I have the image, I'll probably just grep through it, or write some special (==fast) data-pattern searcher. GetDataBack didn't find the file(s) I was looking for, so the filesystem metadata was destroyed/overwritten enough that it won't be helpful, I'll have to boyer-moore on the actualy file contents; good it was text/source files and I have a good idea what to search for.

Of course there's no guarantee that the actual file data wasn't overwritten by windows reinstall, but I hope this windows+kaspersky install is "at the beginning at the disk" and that my file data used to be somewhere around "the middle of the disk".

But of course if what really happened is that I deleted "c:\src" insted of moving it under "c:\stuff", the file data from "c:\src" was probably overwritten when I RAR'ed "c:\stuff" to "c:\stuff.rar". Oh well, time will tell.

6840

Living Room / Re: Batch file - start service, run program, stop service ?

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 06:43 AM »

I use a batch file myself for vmware - no reason to do any more scripting than that, imho . I don't stop the services afterwards, but when I start vmware I usually end up closing the app, starting it again, etc.

Certainly simple and effective

[Select]

@echo off
net start "VMware Authorization Service"
net start "VMware DHCP Service"
net start "VMware NAT Service"
net start "VMware Virtual Mount Manager Extended"
start vmware

6841

General Software Discussion / Re: Data recovery software suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 03:54 AM »

Recuva looks interesting, probably very decent against accidental deletes etc... but is it any good for real recovery? I'm talking of the "Oops, I accidentally formatted my harddrive and reinstalled windows+kaspersky, and realized I didn't get _those_ important files backed up" kind?

Because that's the situation I'm facing right now. GetDataBack found a whole lot of stuff, but not exactly what I was looking for >_<, so now I'm writing my own imaging software.

6842

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 03:48 AM »

Imho, a whole bunch of the app compatibility problems with Vista are because the programmer did things he shouldn't be doing. Putting files in your application folder has been a bad idea ever since NT4 (and perhaps NT3 as well, but I never used that) because sensible ACLs forbid non-admins to mess around with stuff in %ProgramFiles%.

The registry isn't really an issue either, you just have to stick to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and if you need HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE you better well be read-only, or do the write stuff in your installer (which must run with admin privs anyway).

The whole emulation deal in Vista is horrible though, and shows what Microsoft has to go through to keep their stupid legacy support. It's one of the biggest problems with windows, IMHO. The kernel source code even (allegedly) has comments to the effect "this hack is to support XYZ", instead of just using their "bully-power" and forcing XYZ to write proper code instead of violating API specs or depending on undocumented features.

It's pretty sad with all the FSCKED UP CRAP they've done to Vista, because there's some nice stuff in there as well (more aggressive caching, I/O prioritization) - but I can live without the stupid new GUI, this magic trixery for app compact, the DRM crap in the kernel, etc.

Oh yeah, and UAC is so ill-designed and intrusive that many people just end turning it off - way to go. I'd certainly end up turning it off myself, from the limited (4-5 hours) Vista hell I've been enduring.

But obviously MS won't port DX10 to XP even though there's no reason it can't be done, and they won't support hybrid harddrives either even though that's perfectly doable as well, so eventually we'll have to move to Vista anyway :/

Oh, and did I forget mentioning that it's a slow resource hog?

TucknDar: if ReactOS/tinykrnl ever were to really take off, they'd be shot down faster than you can yell lawsuit...

6843

General Software Discussion / Re: best Windows Explorer replacement

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 03:30 AM »

I believe it's somewhat lighter than explorer.exe - but the main reason is really that I can easily remap global hotkeys like Win+E and Win+F to explorer² and locate32, respectively.

I don't use the window skinning or multiple desktops, but I do use my own "run" bar  (probably why I'm not using FARR (yet?)) and a couple of iconboxes.

6844

General Software Discussion / Re: Good (free) encryption... without any trouble ?

« Last post by f0dder on September 01, 2007, 03:27 AM »

Iirc RC4 has some exploitable flaws, but I dunno if that also pertain to how it's used in MS office. You might want to google around for MS office password crackers and see what's available and how fast it works.

6845

Living Room / Re: bioshock on a geforce 6 card - anyone tried?

« Last post by f0dder on August 31, 2007, 08:33 AM »

p3lb0x: the 'f' in my name isn't capital, and I only have a 7600... but yeah, you'll hopefully be getting the card in a couple of weeks

6846

Living Room / Re: 64 bit Vista - help and advice

« Last post by f0dder on August 31, 2007, 08:32 AM »

A 32-bit application still has a 32-bit address space, so it cannot make use of more memory, unless it uses the "address window extensions" API - so you need a 64bit version of photoshop to take advantage of extra memory.

For 32-bit windows, there's boot.ini switch to change the usermode:kernelmode memory address space from 2:2gig to 3:1gig - you should google the boot.ini /3G switch for the implications. Notice that windows will *still* use the default 2:2 split for applications that haven't been marked "large memory aware" though!

Also, even regular 32bit windows should be able to take advantage of >4GB memory, as long as your processor supports PAE mode (introduces with the pentium pro a zillion years ago) - it's turned on by default if you have DEP enabled. This won't let a single application use more memory, but the physical memory can be used for separate instances of your apps, system cache, etc.

6847

Living Room / Re: Any site to download book CD-ROMs from?

« Last post by f0dder on August 31, 2007, 05:04 AM »

No, but sounds interesting... and probably not legal, unless download requires some code from the book.

6848

General Software Discussion / Re: Good (free) encryption... without any trouble ?

« Last post by f0dder on August 31, 2007, 05:03 AM »

With encryption you tend to lose a bigger part of your data if a single sectors goes bad, than without encryption - how much will depend on the encryption mode. A common used mode is CBC - chained block cipher - which is usually done in blocks of some size. If a single harddisk sector fails (even a single bit), all data past the corruption of the block the corruption is in will be fubar. A block would typically be 4kb or so.

I haven't really looked into how the LRW mode in TrueCrypt works, so I can't say anything about that.

6849

General Software Discussion / Re: best Windows Explorer replacement

« Last post by f0dder on August 31, 2007, 04:58 AM »

I personally have replace the explorer.exe shell with blackbox for windows, and explorer.exe file management with explorer². There's a few things that x^2 doesn't handle, like "my network connections", but everything else works perfectly.

(and the netcon issue might be because of the way I did integration, perhaps I need to pass commandline in a different way - x^2 does have shell namespace support etc.!)

6850

General Software Discussion / Re: Data recovery software suggestions?

« Last post by f0dder on August 31, 2007, 04:55 AM »

SpinRite is a big pile of marketing FUD. I can't believe how many people are fooled by marketing buzzwords, bought testimonials, and a silly textmode sine wave. Using it on a drive that's about to have a head crash can be a downright catastrophe, since it puts a lot of stress on the actuators (sp?).

It might help in some cases, but I'd never run it before doing a full image file of the drive. And it's not data recovery software anyway, all it does it trying to read/write bad sectors, which will eventually get them copied to spare sectors on the drive.

For data recovery, have a look at applications like r-studio, GetDataBack, etc... I've had good results with GetDataBack.