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{uZa}Lonesome Eagle
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 12:49 am    Post subject: TIP for Vista Users... Reply with quote

Tip for Vista (cough, Ren, cough) users.

If you are running Vista one of the things you will notice is that over time you seem to lose hard drive space, gigs at a time. Set up a clean install, and let's say you have 200GB free. Play around surfing the web, playing games, whatever you usually do, and without having installed a single piece of software or downloaded anything, you will turn around and have 180GB free a week or two later.

This is due to the way Vista (and to some extent XP, although in a slightly different way) handles "System Restore", now called "Shadow Copy" in Vista. This is the VERY VALUABLE tool which will let you "roll back" to a previous state of your system if there is a big problem.

Vista on installation will determine how much hard drive space you have, and will configure Shadow Copy to use up to a certain percentage to keep restore points. (these are sort of like mini "images" of your system, mostly concentrated on critical system files, drivers etc., it doesn't protect your "data") On my system, with a 250GB Drive C, it set Shadow Copy to keep up to 35GB of "images". It's a FIFO (first in, first out) system, so when it has stored 35GB of restore points, it deletes the oldest to make room for the newest.

Vista will automatically create a "Shadow Copy" / "Restore Point" on a schedule once a day. Also, some software will set a restore point before it installs itself as a courtesy to you in case there is a problem either during or after the install. You can also manually set restore points as you wish.

Each restore point requires about 500MB of hard drive space (more or less, it might be as little as 200MB. So Windows apparently thinks I need to be able to "roll back" up to TWO MONTHS. First of all I generally know there is a big problem immediately, since stuff stops working, and in any case it is my experience that the further back you restore these "images", the less reliable and stable things are. You have made changes to changes upon changes after a few days, and while System Restore has saved my butt more than once if I roll back a restore point from yesterday, it almost never does anything but make things worse if I try to go back a week.

I want to keep the last two to four restore points, and I want my hard drive space back for the rest!

There are two ways to deal with this:

1) You can run Disk Cleanup (comes with Windows) Then click the "More Options" tab and click on "Clean Up..." under "System Restore and Shadow Copies". This will delete all but THE MOST RECENT copy, and give you back all that hard drive space. This is manual, and you will have to remember to do it every few days to keep Windows from just eating the space back up.

2) You can permanently change Shadow Copy to only use the amount of hard drive space you want. You do this from the command line, with a tool called "vssadmin". This tool will let you set the "Maximum" amount of space that Shadow Copy will use to something more reasonable, say 2GB or so. (enough to store 2 days worth of restore points, or as I like to call it - "an heir and a spare")

Go to the Start Menu, and in the Search field type "cmd" and hit enter. This will give you a DOS prompt, and you can type:

>vssadmin /?

To give you a list of supported commands for the tool:

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

---- Commands Supported ----

List Providers - List registered volume shadow copy providers
List Shadows - List existing volume shadow copies
List ShadowStorage - List volume shadow copy storage associations
List Volumes - List volumes eligible for shadow copies
List Writers - List subscribed volume shadow copy writers
Resize ShadowStorage - Resize a volume shadow copy storage association

To see how things are allocated now, type:

>vssadmin list shadowstorage

And you will get results something like this:

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 4.5 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 6.53 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 35 GB


As you can see, Windows has taken 6.53GB of my hard drive space, of which it is currently using 4.5GB (about 8 restore points). It is going to keep saving them until it robs me of 35GB!

So to change it, type:

>vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=2GB

And you will see the following response:

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association

You can check the new settings with:

>vssadmin list shadowstorage

And now you see that it is using 819MB, and has room to store a couple more restore points before it hits the wall at 2GB and has to throw out the oldest one to create a new one.

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 819.734 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.953 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2 GB

Bought me back about 30GB of hard drive space, and it's all set so I don't even have to think about it again.
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{uZa}Having Fun
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 9:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

when i saw this topic , i thought it would be something like : go back to xp Wink
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{uZa}Lonesome Eagle
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 10:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

{uZa}Having Fun wrote:
when i saw this topic , i thought it would be something like : go back to xp Wink


Hahaha! So they have Luddites in Holland too?

Wink
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Morgoth
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 10:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

{uZa}Lonesome Eagle wrote:
{uZa}Having Fun wrote:
when i saw this topic , i thought it would be something like : go back to xp Wink


Hahaha! So they have Luddites in Holland too?

Wink


lmao...


I just used tuneup utilities to drop 6GB of extra data off my XP... but yet saving the last known good restore point.
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{uZa}Having Fun
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 2:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hahaha , yes they have a lot of them here as well

as you know i still use xp on my main pc , but vista is doing just fine on the 2nd .
not sure when i'll switch over on this one to vista as well ..... but thanks for the tip to save some HD space .
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{uZa}Canadian Girl
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 7:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks Eagle.... Smile

You getting tired of my questions.....like finding my files? Wink
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 7:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

{uZa}Canadian Girl wrote:
Thanks Eagle.... Smile

You getting tired of my questions.....like finding my files? Wink


Hehe... Never.
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Morgoth
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 5:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote


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{uZa}Lonesome Eagle
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 6:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think I still have a copy of Edlin somewhere from an old DOS disk if you need it.. Wink
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 10:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

lol.. I thought there was a micro sized OS called Oscar too that was only a couple of kb's... I cant find any info on it anymore...
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

{uZa}Lonesome Eagle wrote:
I think I still have a copy of Edlin somewhere from an old DOS disk if you need it.. Wink


roflmao

People always trying to hold on to what's comfortable to their last dying breath Smile
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

sCaryDeth wrote:
{uZa}Lonesome Eagle wrote:
I think I still have a copy of Edlin somewhere from an old DOS disk if you need it.. Wink


roflmao

People always trying to hold on to what's comfortable to their last dying breath Smile


Hey Freak... On the question of upgrading, what would it take to turn on "embedding" in PhpBB? Would we have to upgrade to a newer version, or it is something already there but disabled in Admin Tools? By embedding I mean using html code to have embedded players for video and music and such in posts. Looks a bit like this, which a poster can just copy and past from YouTube:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nV2u9r4bsOE&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nV2u9r4bsOE&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>



The player itself, (and all the bandwidth used) is still on YouTube, but the player shows in the post and the reader just clicks on the embedded player to view instead of having to load YouTube.com in a new page or tab.

More and more folks are posting links to YouTube and music (mp3) objects, and it would be nice if we could have the video or audio "hotlinked" through embedding code for a player instead of having to click a link and load a new page. Sites like Last.FM and IMEEM and other music sites also give you "embedding" codes for mp3 players directly linked to a song so you just click on the player in the post to hear it.

If it would require an upgrade to PhpBB, what would that take? Would all the customizing you did make it stupid hard? If we can get a bunch of new "Web 2.0" type features, it might be worth even replacing the whole nine-yards with a newer version, as long as we can export and import the existing data (posts). Losing all the current posts would be a disaster.

Some of the features I am often asked about are things like a "live chat" function similar to what is on this page: http://www.codutility.com/index.php?file=News (scroll down about 1/2 way to the "shoutbox"), embedding YouTube / Google Video, and embedding flash containers (instead of using animated .gifs).

I'm glad to help if any of this is possible... PM me.
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.:Boo Radley:.
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 12:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

there is a mod for phpbb, used to have it on my old board it actually posts like this...

[youtube] whateva [/youtube]

Google for the mod it was very simple.

lots of mods out there
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 12:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ha ha


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1G7TJD6Xu0
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{uZa}Lonesome Eagle
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 12:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

.:Boo Radley:. wrote:
there is a mod for phpbb, used to have it on my old board it actually posts like this...

[youtube] whateva [/youtube]

Google for the mod it was very simple.

lots of mods out there


Excellent.. Thanks.
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