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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/24/2014 in all areas

  1. On behalf of all of the MSFN team we wish you and your families a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. May 2015 bring you prosperity and welfare, successes and sincere joy. Thank you for being with us this year. We hope that the year 2014 was successful for you, and that our sites were helpful in your daily activities. Happy Holidays!
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  2. Hello all. I've been using this site as a reference for quite some time and figured I should probably give something back. No idea if anyone will find it useful or not, but here it is, regardless. Basically, I've been tweaking away on a final customised XP install so I never have to fiddle with the d**n thing again and when I need it, it'll be ready. To this end, I've done a fair bit of tweaking and integrating, but there were a few things that I didn't spot cropping up anywhere, so here they are. I'll separate them into multiple posts to keep things coherent. Handy tidbit #2 - Automating ramdisk management of Gavotte's ramdisk (and friends) I want to make use of the RAM in my machines, even when running XP for whatever reason. I found out about the "unmanaged memory" techniques et al., and after much (much) faffing around, I settled on Gavotte as it offered the behaviour and configuration I needed in the most minimal package. I have attached the package I have built to run during my setup. It installs a service that will run at startup and will check and configure the ramdisk with a swap and temp directory on it, and will set up the various junctions to point at it so you don't have to use a drive letter. It will cache the initial state of the built ramdisk in the registry so it will start up faster next time. Now, I've made it very configurable, but I've only fully tested it in my use case, namely, no drive letter, and temp and swap on it where possible. Did I mention, it looks how much RAM you have installed and only moves swap to the ramdisk where it makes sense to? (i.e. > 4GB). I've tested this exhaustively in vmware by adjusting memory amounts - it should handle any sizes (fingers crossed!). As I started to mention, it's pretty configurable. There's a reg file in there with the default values that you can add, and then easily change (i.e. if you don't want any temp management, change the NOTEMP reg value from 0x0 to 0x1...or indeed, anything other than 0x0). It also has some desktop.ini files hardcoded in there with icons you probably won't have. I should probably make those easier to change with out fiddling with the script, but I'm pretty sick of fiddling with this thing now, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the user. As part of this project, I needed devcon.exe and srvany.exe, neither of which are redistributable, so if I wanted to share, I had to find alternatives. Well, I found that Microsoft have made devcon a sample bit of code that, if I read the license correctly, I can redistribute, if I compile it myself and maintain all copyright notices. You can find the original source here. I've fixed it up to compile under my old copy of VS2008 on XP, and it works a treat. I'll package that up some other time if anyone asks. As for srvany, that was a bit harder, but I found an open source reimplementation of it here. This required a fair bit of fixing up to make drop-in compatible with the stock version, but it now is. Again, I'll package up that source when someone asks. The complied binaries for both are naturally in the 7z SFX executable attached. I don't really have the time to support any of these properly, but let me know and I'll do what I can. I just figured it was better to share something rather than nothing. Thanks to you all for the help you unknowingly have been giving me. EDIT: for anyone worried about opening strange EXEs (and well you should!), I've attached the raw 7z archive...though you could just open the exe in 7z if you liked RAMDISK - Gavotte - 1.0.4096.5 - 20081113 - x86.7z RAMDISK - Gavotte - 1.0.4096.5 - 20081113 - x86.exe
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