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[ArchimedesWojak]

ok

[Reelya]

You should know, or be able to mount ISOs as drives outside a virtual machine too, that's a useful thing to know how to do in general.

In recent Windows, you just right-click on the ISO file and select "mount". That then generates a temporary drive letter / pretend drive for that ISO file. Right-Clicking on the drive letter from the "This PC" screen gives a menu option to "eject" the pretend disk, which just unmounts it / deletes the drive letter, if it's not really a DVD drive. In earlier versions of Windows you'd have needed third-party software to do all of this, but it's a standard feature with Windows 10.

Then, in your VM software, when setting up the drives you can tell it to mount a host-system drive. This can be a real drive, or one of Window's fake ones you made in the first step from an ISO, Virtualbox won't know the difference. I'm mentioning this method because it works the same this way whether you've got a real CD/DVD drive or a fake one via an ISO file.

[Imic]

My PC has very little space left on it, but when I look through the storage settings, nothing in the apps and features section, where most of the space is being taken up, is more than half a gig in size, and that one thing that’s 491 MB is by far the exception rather than the rule, from there only four of the listed apps have more than a hundred Mb. It’s fairly obvious that there’s something my computer’s not showing me, but I have no idea where to look, and though I’d like to, getting a new hard drive and moving only the important stuff over isn’t an option for me right now. Would anyone have any advice on this situation?

[Reelya]

What steps have you taken to do disk cleaning if any?

Apps and features is not where the issue is, it's almost always temp files, install backups, system restore points etc. you can loo in the temp folder for your users, usually a ton of deletable files in there.

Do Disk cleanup, then select the systems files option. For example, when you do a major update for Windows it keeps a copy of the previous major version for rollback purposes. If you never rollback then this is a huge chunk of drive real-estate you can get back for free.

ccleaner is a tool that removes temp files from a bunch of places (which will overlap with what disk cleanup does, but I'd let Windows to the cleanup first), you can get it on portableapps to avoid having to install ccleaner. Run the normal scan/clean process from this.

https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/ccportable

[Imic]

I got about 8 or nine gigs in total from doing that, I knew about CCcleaner but not about the system files in the disk cleanup thing, thanks for that. All that being said, there's still almost 400 gigs of space being used, even after I've uninstalled all my games on steam. If anything, this is probably why they haven't been reinstalled.

[Reelya]

Right click on folders, view the size. Then tunnel into the biggest one, repeat, until you narrow down where the usage is. It's probably in users/<name>/appdata/local and users/<name>/appdata/roaming

Once you're in there however you may have a lot of apps to click on, so a good way is binary search: highlight the top half of apps, right click and view properties. do the same for the other half. You'll usually see one group of folders is far larger than the other.

EDIT: let me give you the magic which is TreeSize
https://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/treesize-free-portable

i used this years ago, testing the new version. This scans your drive, displays the folders in tree view, however it sorts them from biggest to smallest too.

[Mephisto]

For a visual representation of where storage is being used, I like WinDirStat. If you're sure you don't need something, you can delete it from WinDirStat's listing instead of having to navigate to it via explorer.

[Reelya]

TreeSize will do that too, apparently*.

* as in, I'm trying it out right now but don't want to actually delete anything, not 'apparently' as in they claim it can be done on the website.

[bloop_bleep]

Why is setting up SDL so difficult. I might just compile from source at this point.

On a related note. Why do packages keep putting junk unrelated to the outward functionality of the package in my PATH. Just use paths relative to the installation directory. I don't need your stinking personal gcc installation popping up perl.

[feelotraveller]

I'd hazard a guess that your problems are distro specific.  (No problem encountered on my end with setting up/using sdl/sdl2 and no weird paths with perl... not that I did anything but install packages provided by my distro...)  But it is a guess since you've not said which distro.  If it's Ubuntu (earlier posts) perhaps this link will help with the first: https://gist.github.com/BoredBored/3187339a99f7786c25075d4d9c80fad5  Nothing wrong with compiling it yourself, though.  The weird paths you'd have to take up with the packager.

[methylatedspirit]

Is it bad that my laptop's 170W power brick has been hot for most of its operating life? The laptop's been pulling 75W (~45% of rated power output), day in, day out, from April at least, so I'm wondering if that will shorten the lifetime of the brick significantly. I know I should probably be worrying about the laptop more, but it's for the good of humanity, I swear.

[Schmaven]

Is it bad that my laptop's 170W power brick has been hot for most of its operating life? The laptop's been pulling 75W (~45% of rated power output), day in, day out, from April at least, so I'm wondering if that will shorten the lifetime of the brick significantly. I know I should probably be worrying about the laptop more, but it's for the good of humanity, I swear.

If you don't already, unplugging it from the wall from time to time will extend its life.

[bloop_bleep]

But will put stress on the battery.

I'd hazard a guess that your problems are distro specific.  (No problem encountered on my end with setting up/using sdl/sdl2 and no weird paths with perl... not that I did anything but install packages provided by my distro...)  But it is a guess since you've not said which distro.  If it's Ubuntu (earlier posts) perhaps this link will help with the first: https://gist.github.com/BoredBored/3187339a99f7786c25075d4d9c80fad5  Nothing wrong with compiling it yourself, though.  The weird paths you'd have to take up with the packager.

I’m on Windows right now, actually. Thanks anyway.

As for weird paths, I’ve nuked them from PATH since they were interfering and the thing I was using Perl for didn’t seem to complain.

EDIT: It seems the problem is with libmingw32 actually. It has several unresolved external symbols. Online it suggests it may be using outdated microsoft API functions.

[bloop_bleep]

Apparently actually I have an outdated C runtime on my machine and libmingw32 is trying to access the new runtime functions. How do I update my C runtime?

EDIT: Except msvcrt says last modified in March 2019. The C runtime changes were made in 2015. This is confusing.
EDIT: Is libmingw32 trying to link against msvcrt or something else? What other files can contain C runtime functions?
EDIT: Is there a reputable source for downloading the latest msvcrt?
EDIT: Changed search directory to C:/Windows/SysWOW64. Now it compiles and links but crashes on startup with a dll not found error code. Sigh.

[Reelya]

I'd never fuck with the SysWOW directories or anything like that, the normal way to fix that is you put the required DLLs directly in the working directory of the program you're running. It'll see those DLLs and used them. I do this for some old games that need a very specific version of Dx9 dlls.

So you just get some old MsVC runtimes and try extracting the dlls into the folder you're using. You also do this for old VB runtimes and other files which are way too old for Windows to have anymore. Trying to mesh those into Windows system32 or syswow isn't required or a good idea.

And the point with SysWOW is that Windows scans the exe you're trying to run, extracts some version information, then it looks that up in a directory which tells it which version of the DLL to provide. If you randomly add "bonus" DLLs, it doesn't have the information to match that "bonus" DLL with any actual programs, so it will never go "here, here's the DLL version you need". It's like saying you added extra books to a library but didn't bother adding them to the card catalogue. They're in there, but the librarian is never going to direct you to them.