The Don's Craptastic World

9Sep/090

SpaceSniffer: Show disk space usage the graphical way

Thanks to Carsten Knobloch a.k.a. Caschy, a german blogger, I found an interesting software. SpaceSniffer allows you to show how much disk space each application, down to each single file, uses the graphical way. It's available for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, and it's freeware!

What it essentially does is, it scans the whole hard drive, renders different images depending on disk usage and assigns them to each single file and folder. There's a way to show more details, meaning going deeper down to show the usage of each single file, or less details showing only the folders.

SpaceSniffer is more focused on clean graphical display than detailed information, like WinDirStat for example. You can directly manipulate the files/folders from inside the application. Double clicking a "block" will cause it to show you more detailed information (files) about it.

One use, suggested by Caschy, would be to delete unnecessary files if you plan to do backups. Saves time and disk space. I'm sure there are other uses for it, I personally use it to check usage by each application I have installed.

Filed under: Software No Comments

7Sep/0947

Fraps & VirtualDub: How to save disk space and enjoy good quality, small file size HD video clips

VirtualDub & Fraps settings

The biggest problem most of us face while recording gameplay clips with Fraps is its disk space usage. Fraps records everything uncompressed, continuously (free version is limited to 30 sec.) and sequential. Meaning from start till stop the "whole" clip is split into single 4GB files (For FAT32 filesystem user convenience).

The length of a single 4 GB clip depends on the resolution and the in-game scene you record it in. For example, for me a 4 GB clip has about 90 sec. worth of gameplay in 1920x1200 resolution.

Because of this uncompressed real-time recording your frame-rates drops significantly while playing. There is NO way to keep up 40+fps with Fraps running unless you have one hell of a monster system.

Imagine what happens when you want to capture a 30+ min gameplay clip. Either you buy yourself a Terabyte HDD or you use a very simple trick: recording in half-size, upscaling and sharpening. Read the How-To guide!

Filed under: Software, Tips and Tricks Continue reading

5Sep/0917

How to fix the video lag in Firefox!

firefox Lately my video (HD) playbacks in YouTube seemed to be lagging a LOT! I wondered why. I thought it would be me and my years old OS or perhaps even somehow my pc.

But no it wasn't. The lag was caused by Firefox's session saving feature. A simple and fast change in it and "poof" went the lag.

Open Firefox and type in "about:config" (without the ") in the Address Bar and hit Enter.
Type in "session" in the "Filter" line at the top of the list.
Find “browser.sessionstore.interval” and double click it. The 10000 milliseconds (equals 10 seconds) is the interval in which Firefox keeps saving your session in case of a crash; same amount of time between video lags.
Change it to something different. 120000 equals 2 minutes, 300000 equals 5 minutes or something else you desire. I went with 600000 (10 minutes), because I don’t particularly care about session saving.

Filed under: Software, Tips and Tricks 17 Comments

2Sep/090

Deutsche und die Tendez zur ueberdramatisierung

drama Mir wurde mehrfach gesagt, ich solle doch auch mal deutsche Artikel verfassen. Da ich den größten Teil meiner Zeit mit englischen Texten verbringe, hat sich bisher nicht wirklich die Gelegenheit ergeben.

Nun allerdings muss ich meine Meinung loswerden. Die Deutschen tendieren Sachen bis ins äußerste zu Überdramatisieren.

Vor kurzem hatte ein guter Freund mich auf einen Artikel bei Spiegel Online verwiesen, in dem es darum ging, dass ein Mann eine einzige daumengroße Giftkraut "Kreuzkraut" in einer Rucola-Salatschale fand und es einem örtlichem Arbeitskreis mitteilte.

Filed under: Deutsch, Random-ness Continue reading

31Aug/090

Must-Have High-Res Fallout 3 Texture Packs for official DLCs!

Back then I listed the "must-have" texture packs for Fallout 3 to greatly enhance F3's graphics. Since then Bethesda released 5 DLCs (Operation Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta), and modders have been going crazy.

There are all kind of HD (HQ, HiRes or High-Res, same meaning different spelling) (re-)texture packs and different (re-)models of pretty much anything on Fallout 3 Nexus. If you still don't know it, Fallout 3 Nexus is the main source for Fallout 3 mods, models and textures.

Running with higher resolution texture packs as always results in higher demand on your computer. Be sure your PC can handle it, don't install all texture packs at once. Install one pack at a time, test it out then continue with the next.

Long story short: I'm quite fond of 4Aces DLC high-res textures [direct link]. Enjoy!

Addendum 17.05.2010:
Like a lot of people who have large amount of mods, especially texture mods, I've experienced frequent crashes to desktop. This is due the fact that Fallout 3 is a 32Bit game which in turn results in the usage of a maximum of 2GB of RAM. If you have, say 4GB RAM or more, Fallout 3 makes no use of it.

Fear not, there has been a solution since last year which I completely missed up until a few months ago. Large Address Aware Enabler for FO3 or FO3 RAM Boost. Either one works and reduces the crashes to almost a nonexistence.

Some Fallout related videos:

Filed under: PC Games Continue reading

30Aug/090

Remove driver leftovers with Driver Sweeper!

Delete Leftovers with Driver Sweeper!

A long time ago I had DriverCleaner, a tool to remove certain driver leftovers! Lately I've had to battle with some odd issues about my graphic card driver leftovers. They just won't delete. I wanted a clean de-installation because some games started to act up.

So I set out to look for a modern and up-to-date (and possibly free!) alternative to DriverCleaner and I came across Guru 3D's Driver Sweeper. I recommend this application! It's up-to-date (latest 23.07.2009) and deletes everything (as far as I can see, it resolved my issues at least).

Drive Sweeper deletes ATI (Display), NVIDIA (Display and Chipset), Ageia (PhysX), Creative (Sound), MMouse (whatever that is) and Realtek (Sound) drivers. I wanted it to delete my ATI driver leftovers.

According to Guru3D it also runs on any modern Windows system including Win7:

System requirements:
The Guru3D - Driver Sweeper is fully tested on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows & 7 RC. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are supported.

The absolutely best and sure way to delete anything is first to uninstall it via its official Uninstaller, then reboot your system into Safe Mode and fire up Driver Sweeper. Skiping Safe Mode also works but some files might not get deleted in the process.

Filed under: Software No Comments