Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

[Turner]

Smaller CDs has smaller capacities. The 3in had about the size you're thinking of.

The 5in had varying capacities, but they were all pretty close to one another.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

No, im thinking of the regular 120mm sized CD's, not the mini-CD's

 

[Turner]

Well, I didn't see that on Wiki. Of course, Wiki is not the end all be all of knowledge....

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Because the game might not necessarily store them in any format easily readable. Company of Heroes for instance uses archive files for all the different game assets, and in order to get at them, you need to be able to open the archives. Same goes for a lot of other games.

Universal Extractor

Can open nearly any archive.

 

[lndm]

Werent there smaller capacity CD's back then too? I quite distinctly remember seeing 250mb and even 150mb CD's.

You wouldn't be thinking of zip-drives, would you?

 

[Turner]

Zip drives had a bunch of different densities.... But it's kinda hard to mistake a zip disk for a CD rom.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Universal Extractor

Can open nearly any archive.

Not even close to 'nearly any'
It can open most public and easily available archives. A lot of game studios use proprietary archives though for which you need special programs tailored specifically for those archives.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Not even close to 'nearly any'
It can open most public and easily available archives. A lot of game studios use proprietary archives though for which you need special programs tailored specifically for those archives.

Oops.

I have a zip disk, but I don't remember where I got it. I keep it just for novelty.

I once seen this really really tiny CD, about 1/3 of the size of a regular one. Came in one of those "pocket books".

 

[lndm]

....it's kinda hard to mistake a zip disk for a CD rom.

I know, no offence intended. This was a number of years ago and I thought it might just be worth mentioning

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Maybe if you only seen the packages you could confuse them.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Okay, I remembered where I seen them. One of my friends has an original Raiden II disk that's a 350MB CD ( As in, the max capacity is 350MB, not the game size)
Its probly just a special CD made for the game ( or something like that )

 

[Turner]

I know, no offence intended. This was a number of years ago and I thought it might just be worth mentioning

None taken.

@ GB - This was for a game? It's been my experience that windows will show the disc capacity as whatever the written amount is. So if you have a game that takes up 200mb on the disc, then it will show the inferred capacity as 200mb. That is, it doesn't actually say 200mb capacity, but it does show 200mb used and 0 free.

And it would be fairly accurate too, as the 'extra' space on that is wasted. No way to use it... which would only frustrate me more if I had that many more discs to keep track of.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Naw, the game was less than 350mb. It was the weird old days, and the game actually came on a CD-RW (thats how I know its 350mb). My friend discovered this fact after he accidentally burned something else on it. Luckily for him, he had big HDD's so he had a backup of the game.

Now that I think about it, kind of silly really. Maybe it was some form of early DRM. If you crack it, itll erase the game!

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Am I the only one who thinks that all these "optimization" utilities sound kind of dodgy?

 

[lndm]

So if you have a game that takes up 200mb on the disc, then it will show the inferred capacity as 200mb.

Maybe the filesystems are optimised before writing to the disc.

I can imagine that the best way for the CDROM system to have been engineered would be for the disc itself to be a blank slate, and for the operating system to sense the drive parameters by looking at the filesystem. If the physical disc parameters are flagged in a system area of the disc and handled solely within hardware, it would allow the disc size to be versatile. Too bad it didn't go anywhere


@aimee, do you have an example?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

This is the first one I could think of: http://www.reg-boost.com/

 

[lndm]

I would steer clear of these. I'm not saying this particular one is a problem although it does set my senses tingling and I wouldn't touch it myself. It's just the kind of thing that'd be installed by the person(s) that install those trojan fake anti-virus apps that extort money from you to reduce their threat level.

If you wan't to get good advice, you ought to use your geek senses. Geeks enjoy black and white technical discussion and dislike advertising.


.....also the first one I could think of http://www.annoyances.org/

 

[Zelig]

Am I the only one who thinks that all these "optimization" utilities sound kind of dodgy?

That's why nobody who knows about computers actually uses them.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I've always found them awful suspicious. I suspect a few of the viruses mom got on her computer were due to these.

Also, the registry optimizers just sound dangerous, what if you delete the wrong thing? And how can a smaller registry make things faster, anyways?

 

[lndm]

The concept of registry optimising is similar to emptying the recycle bin, deleting unnecessary files and defragmenting a filesystem. In earlier windows, the registry used to get bloated if things were often changed. Windows takes a few seconds at startup to deal with the registry, and a few seconds is a few seconds. I can't remember where but I read that this is much less of an issue with modern windows versions. In my opinion, if your OS has been installed long enough and had enough things installed and removed to start thinking about this then reinstalling windows would probably be on the table as well.

If you want to do some tweaking, why not try disabling some startup services. You can achieve small (or larger) improvements in startup times, memory usage and ongoing windows performance in some areas. Switching off services needs care, but if you do your homework and learn the effect of turning off services then it becomes relatively safe to do so. Here is one guide http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm I don't necessarily endorse this one guide though I have used it. Get multiple opinions if possible. Write down your findings.

Some services are quite straightforward and easy to decide on and you could deal with these purely using common sense. Some have dependencies (other services need them to be running as well). Some services are controversial...some think they're the best and some, the worst, but these few can make a difference.