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[Khan Boyzitbig]

Well at least you know for the future right?

[wierd]

LOL. good old init files.

Still, Yeah.  If you run into another bloated title that demands to be on the C drive, give symmover a shot.

To answer your prior question about saving new files there--  Any file you write into the linked directory will be physically written to the other drive. The magic is being done at that folder's level. Anything inside that folder will be on the other drive.  You could write the file to either location, and it will show up inside that folder on C. Easiest just to pretend it lives on the C drive, the way you make the computer think it is, and just roll with it.

Titles that use hardlinks though (Just about ANYTHING from microsoft...) will abuse the winsxs folder. Files are actually written to winsxs, and hardlinked against that location. Microsoft's software demands to be in that location for updates to happen, so you cant move it out. This means things like internet explorer, windows media player, and pals-- cannot be moved. (A real troublesome thing on those very space constrained tablets I mentioned.)

Everything else is fair game through.

[Reelya]

This is the reason all my Microsoft dev software now lives inside a virtual machine running on my SSD. Microsoft Visual Studio pollutes your system something chronic, and it's a pain to have to reinstall all of that if I choose to do a full windows refresh. So, my entire dev environment is now isolated from my normal operating system, which is really great. No more having to patch everything back together from scratch in case of some sort of windows fuckup or reset.

[wierd]

Just on a general "why?" question that I am just curious about...

Does anyone know WHY microsoft uses Hard Links instead of symbolic links for the winsxs folder?  I really don't see the advantage. It wont be any faster, and just introduces more stringent requirements. If they had used soft links, the winsxs folder could have been anywhere, and would not be mandated to be on the C: drive. (since you could then have the winsxs folder be an ntfs mount point to a dedicated volume, with all the locations on C: being softlinks against that mountpoint.) It cant be because they think they need to purposefully prevent such things, can it?  They aren't that nanny inclined, right?

[scriver]

Well at least you know for the future right?

Yeah. Until I forget

Thanks for the help anyway, everybody.

[misko27]

Ok, so, context: My laptop (Dell Inspiron 7000 or something like that) is a little old now. I got it about two and a half years ago, and apparently, that's a long time in laptop years. I am fairly rough on my stuff, so it's more than a little worse for wear: in fact it has some serious structural damage (mostly with the screen and frame). I've had it repaired a few times and replaced the screen a few times; it's not great off now, but the main issue tends to be with the screen than anything else. All of my problems with it have been limited to physical damage on the screen or around it, or to wifi, never to power or battery or anything along those lines.

Cut to a few weeks ago, I started having issues with freezing. This universally happened during games, and always took one of two forms: 1) my computer would become completely unresponsive save for holding the power button to shut it off, 2), it would simply turn off with no prior warning as if I had been pressing down on the power button (like if I had unplugged a desktop). It's started happening fairly frequently, such that I find myself unable to play multiplayer games for extended periods of time without a crash. I tried a program that would let me read the crash reports, but I found that there apparently aren't any, even though it is set to do so (there might have been a space issue? My computer is pretty full...).

So my question: what do I do? I've heard suggestions of an overheating issue, but while it does seem to get kinda hot, my skepticism with that is that it's never happened in all the time I spent playing games on it before, and this started in the middle of the coldest part of the winter so far (Below 10 Fahrenheit). I guess more specifically, my question is: what should I do to try and figure out what's wrong? I'm completely willing to open my computer up (and have done already, both to upgrade and repair) and do repairs or anything else, but I'd rather not jump down a rabbit hole like that unless I'm fairly certain that's where the problem is going to be. Could it be a memory issue? Something with the hard-drive? Wires going undone, or graphics card crashing, or dust, or fan, or what? Hardware, software? I just don't know where I should look.

[wierd]

Old thermal pad is probably crispy and not really working anymore.

Replace thermal pad with actual thermal joint compound. See if issue persists.

[Khan Boyzitbig]

Well that was a funky thing. I was wondering about an update to a game so checked its install folder for a changelog (there wasn't one) from there I had a look at the game's logs and found its latest log which said it was using the Intel driver rather than the AMD one so I checked to see what was going on.

Radeon settings wouldn't open because "the GPU wasn't correct or the driver had failed", So i check with sfc, yeah the driver is corrupt was the answer, and that "MSFT_NetIPv6Protocol.cdxml" was also not right.

I try using device manager to roll back the GPU driver (I'll see if I can fix the other thing tomorrow) and the system sort of hangs, then crashes stating something that doesn't make sense.

ATTEMPTED_EXECUTE_NON_EXECUTABLE_MEMORY USBhub3.sys
Or something like that. I checked event viewer which wasn't very informative, but did mention that the keyboard had reset and sent an incorrect response.
Also this: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0x000000fc  (0xfffff800b06c7270, 0x8000000246331021, 0xffffd00026617620, 0x0000000000000002)

Keyboard is working fine right now, Mouse is okay, Had to turn the WiFi on and off a couple times before it worked and the whole thing loaded slowly but the GPU driver seems to be okay right now too. Was it "one of those things"?

[gimlet]

That's the kind of thing that will get me to run memtest overnight - well worth doing periodically, I'm way too lazy unless I get spooked by something like that.  Oh and take a look at your drive stats, make sure it's not starting to get errors:  look at the SMART diagnostics, even Speedfan has a tab with them, or find and dlownload the diagnostic program from the manufacturer of your hard drive.  Run the short diagnostic, then the long diagnostic with write test overnight especially if it's been a while since you've tested.  Compare the error counts.  Get prime95 and run it for a while (it stresses the cpu), while checking your CPU and motherboard temperatures (what I mainly use Speedfan for).

Maybe run some virus/malware scans, download a couple good free ones and see if anything comes up.  (Make SURE they don't install a permanent runtime check, having more than one of those running at once is "not good".  I just delete them after I'm done now)

So that's my version of "the usual suspects" - takes a fair amount of clock time while the stuff runs, but it's not really that much effort - download, kick it off, come back later and look at results.

[Tawa]

I'm trying to make a script to run Daggerfall with only one command. How would one create a script that opens DOSBox, then runs commands in DOSBox? Is it possible?

[Lord Shonus]

That shouldn't require scripting at all. That just requires editing of the Dosbox config file. I know how to do it on Windows, but not other platforms. The process should be broadly similar on all platforms, but I'm not certain.

On Windows (going off memory, you might need to do some tweaking):

Make a Copy of your "dosbox.conf" file, named something like "Daggerfall.conf".
Configure the new file appropriately for daggerfall.
Under the "autoexec" section, type something along these lines (naturally, you'll have to substitute the mount path for what you have on your system, and I'm not certain of the exact filenames for this particular game)
MOUNT C C:\Games\Dos\
C:
CD DAGGER
DAGGER.EXE


Once you've done that, create a shortcut to Dosbox. Edit the shortcut, and replace DOSBox.exe with DOSBox.exe -conf "DAGGERFALL.CONF"

This should allow you to click the shortcut to start.

[wierd]

Dosbox DOES accept commands over the command line though.

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/DOSBoxShortcuts

[Tawa]

Ah, thanks for the help, guys. Got it up and running now.

[AzyWng]

So my monitor on my laptop just suddenly shut itself off without warning.

I was able to reboot the laptop and things seem to be working fine for now. Any idea what might have caused this?

I had a number of tabs open in Mozilla Firefox, and I was downloading a game on Steam. Are either of those things frequent causes of laptop crashing?

[Reudh]

So my monitor on my laptop just suddenly shut itself off without warning.

I was able to reboot the laptop and things seem to be working fine for now. Any idea what might have caused this?

I had a number of tabs open in Mozilla Firefox, and I was downloading a game on Steam. Are either of those things frequent causes of laptop crashing?

Not sure, but that sounds like it could be a graphics driver crash, and the computer failed to restart or rescue the graphics driver. I had similar things happen on my old laptop. And no, downloading a game is unlikely to cause a graphics driver crash like that. Maaaaaaybe having lots of tabs open, especially ones loading youtube etc. Laptop GPUs aren't great anyway.