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ok,
so my weekend started with a blue screen of death
laughed in the face of adversity as i normally ghost every 2-3 days if not more.
went to dig out and restore the ghost date d afew days back, oopsy daisy i had just that previous night, deleted them as i needed the space temporarily, thinking i can re-ghost tomorrow, not figuring on this blue meanie.
gulp.
i think i went white, as the only ghost i could find was dated 2 weeks before, now to the average "ghoster" that seems fine, a nice recent creation, but when i sometimes ghost every few days this was positively ancient.....the ammount of configuring, tweaking and changes i make demand this.
with nothing else to do than go from the old ghost, i restore and then go about, from memory making the tweaks, vb scripts, custom messageboxes, reg entries, etc etc from the last 2 weeks, i get to a stage where i am confident most of it is ok.
as a force of habit before a ghost to make the image small as possible, i clean out all net files, temp files, and normally utilize windows built in disk cleanup option, those familiar with it will be aware that there is a host of options of what it will clean for you within it, i usually have all checked and let it blitz then ghost away.
so i ghosted, rebooted, same thing - blue screen and instant shut off before getting into windows.
i think i went white, as all of the before mentioned had taken me a solid day to go through.
so i sat down and wrote down all the things i had done since the old ghost, looked at the list....ALL of it was what i had consistently done for ages and ages and years and eons and millenia before, lol.
stumped....i re-ghosted my old ghost back and proceeded to start again, retracing my steps and making the tweaks but this time...oe by one then rebooting and seeing if it would let me in......so i make all the changes again....god i get ratty when i goto bed late!
and have rebooted about 50 times after each of these changes i want to make....all is well, no blue screen....so i ghost now at this point...so i can start from here is something goes pear shaped. did that. back into os....then i do this final operation of using disk cleanup...i reboot just to check thats not the culprit...guess what a nice blue screen again....blow me down with a feather...here i have diskcleanup the thing i have used before and time again bsoding me out the water. so i re-ghost. go into disk cleanup check each of the options one by one...rebooting after each one...turns out all of the options is clean apart fromthe beloved compress old files.
now i have used that before constantly...never been a problem.
so i do do a bit of research and see that occasionally, just very occasionally, (like as often as that freak surf wave in point break comes along) it can just happen that a fairly important file, just as it is getting compressed can be interrupted in its tracks and be halp or partially compressed or however you wanna call it. wow
that was it. so i knew of how to use command line options to compress from my dos days, so i thought if i can get in in safe mode....so i ghost back to my corrupt install, safe mode it, up with a prompt and attempt to use the inbuilt command COMPACT
to perform the following file operation: compact /u /i /f /s:c:\
just to explain, you are invoking compact with /u for uncompress as opposed to compress, i/ for ignore any errors, /f for forcing the operational state to uncompress a file, even if it was partially completed before. /s to enumerate all sub dirs of the specified drive letter (d in my case)
bang...of she goes......a dos box scrolling thousands of lines of code a minute as it uncompresses every file on my drive.
basically i have found even if you dont explicitly specify to enable compression on a drive, it happens anyway!!!! the logic of file compression would dictate that a file is reduced in size to save space, when it is accessed it transparently and seamlessly deflates, (unpacks) on the fly for the system to use, then after its done with compresses again, now in anyones terms that is a lot of I/O traffic on the system.....ok back to my story...read on for advice at end.
ok so after about 30mins of uncompressing the entire drive, its done. so i cross my fingers and reboot hoping this will undo the evil once in a lifetime freak of a corruption that occurred before....get to the stage where it normally bsods,......and yes...it turns blue one more time. now i am deflated, dunno about all those files. oh well.
o so it couldnt undo it...but now i got to thinking of my new ghosted effort and the future....what is it all of us bf2ers want, well for me, apart from the bugs within the game fixed, beside that, i want a lean and clean and efficient a environment to play bf2 in and squeeze every little ounce of performace out of it i can, god knows it needs it.
so i re-ghost my mostly goody back, tinker a bit...happy with that...so then i do this uncompression thing on this drive.
reboot, no probs.
i notice everything is a little bit more responsive, now you guys will say you have a freshly ghosted system...true but that is my point of comparison most days anyway, so i mean over and above that...turns out hundred and thousands of files were compressed, which i knew about, but hadnt fathomed in on the whys and wherefore and the impact they could have
think about it, your bf2 directory with all the files compressed, you crank up the game, each time a file is requested, could be a cached geometry or terrain file, a sound file, punkbuster file, you name it, it is being out through the mill, firstly by having to be held and for it to ask windows to uncompress it.......then allow it time to play...then after finito, ask windows to compress it back...now in my books thats ludicrous for something that demands instantaneous free use of files very quickly! why not stop that happening all the time.
well i decided to opt into this, and have to report for me i believe there is a performance gain...nothing massive, but something constant and low-level.
being a fair type of guy i have to also report that before uncompression my total used figure for my hard drive was 13gb used. after uncompressing everything this rose to 14.5gb a fairly substantial rise.....but with most modern systems youve got the hard drive space, and if you are like amd most other bf2 players use NTFS as youe xp file system it could even be good news, as ntfs gets more effiecient at its job the more data it has to work with.
ok so for those who have survived this quick typing tyrade before i forget it all...here comes the how to implement this on your system bit:
1. backup ure system...so i cant be blamed.
2. bring up a cmd prompt and type this: compact /u /i /f /s:c:\
3. press enter, prepare to wait from 30mins + depending on hardware.
4. dont do it in safe mode, well you can, but it takes about 4 times longer.
note the drive letter c: at end needs to be adjusted if u have dif letter.
after it finishes do this;
bring up a cmd prompt and type: compact /u /s:c:\ .
IMPORTANT, this will not go through all of that again, this is instantaneous. this simply tells files not to compress in drive c in the future.
but you must type it exactly as i have written it, that is a space after the backslash at the end then a full stop then enter
this next thing is optional, if you never want to have file compression happen on yuor system again by accident open regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches
right click on the main key named VolumeCaches and choose export and save as VolumeCaches.reg somewhere safe. this is solely so you can easily restore it if needed ever.
once you have done that right click on the sub key folder below VolumeCaches and delete the entry called "compress old files"
thats it then exit.
then to completely eliminate the compression automatially happening do this:
go to your inbuilt search in xp, specify your system drive to search in, the file name you want to search for is compact.exe
choose options to search hdden files and folder, and system files. then you should find a couple of instances are returned in search.
firstly rename the compact.exe in the dllcache folder to compact.exe.bak if you do it on the one in your system32 folder it will just return, do the dllcache one first
then the system32 next and then any others, basically you are just appending the .bak extension into their filenames: compact.exe.bak
after that that is it, but windows file checker will prompt you saying an unrecognized file if found...just cause you have renamed them...just click cancel when it asks you if you want windows to replace it, then it will ask you if you want to keep these unrecognized versions...YES to that and that is it. REBOOT. phew
adam
so my weekend started with a blue screen of death
laughed in the face of adversity as i normally ghost every 2-3 days if not more.
went to dig out and restore the ghost date d afew days back, oopsy daisy i had just that previous night, deleted them as i needed the space temporarily, thinking i can re-ghost tomorrow, not figuring on this blue meanie.
gulp.
i think i went white, as the only ghost i could find was dated 2 weeks before, now to the average "ghoster" that seems fine, a nice recent creation, but when i sometimes ghost every few days this was positively ancient.....the ammount of configuring, tweaking and changes i make demand this.
with nothing else to do than go from the old ghost, i restore and then go about, from memory making the tweaks, vb scripts, custom messageboxes, reg entries, etc etc from the last 2 weeks, i get to a stage where i am confident most of it is ok.
as a force of habit before a ghost to make the image small as possible, i clean out all net files, temp files, and normally utilize windows built in disk cleanup option, those familiar with it will be aware that there is a host of options of what it will clean for you within it, i usually have all checked and let it blitz then ghost away.
so i ghosted, rebooted, same thing - blue screen and instant shut off before getting into windows.
i think i went white, as all of the before mentioned had taken me a solid day to go through.
so i sat down and wrote down all the things i had done since the old ghost, looked at the list....ALL of it was what i had consistently done for ages and ages and years and eons and millenia before, lol.
stumped....i re-ghosted my old ghost back and proceeded to start again, retracing my steps and making the tweaks but this time...oe by one then rebooting and seeing if it would let me in......so i make all the changes again....god i get ratty when i goto bed late!
and have rebooted about 50 times after each of these changes i want to make....all is well, no blue screen....so i ghost now at this point...so i can start from here is something goes pear shaped. did that. back into os....then i do this final operation of using disk cleanup...i reboot just to check thats not the culprit...guess what a nice blue screen again....blow me down with a feather...here i have diskcleanup the thing i have used before and time again bsoding me out the water. so i re-ghost. go into disk cleanup check each of the options one by one...rebooting after each one...turns out all of the options is clean apart fromthe beloved compress old files.
now i have used that before constantly...never been a problem.
so i do do a bit of research and see that occasionally, just very occasionally, (like as often as that freak surf wave in point break comes along) it can just happen that a fairly important file, just as it is getting compressed can be interrupted in its tracks and be halp or partially compressed or however you wanna call it. wow
that was it. so i knew of how to use command line options to compress from my dos days, so i thought if i can get in in safe mode....so i ghost back to my corrupt install, safe mode it, up with a prompt and attempt to use the inbuilt command COMPACT
to perform the following file operation: compact /u /i /f /s:c:\
just to explain, you are invoking compact with /u for uncompress as opposed to compress, i/ for ignore any errors, /f for forcing the operational state to uncompress a file, even if it was partially completed before. /s to enumerate all sub dirs of the specified drive letter (d in my case)
bang...of she goes......a dos box scrolling thousands of lines of code a minute as it uncompresses every file on my drive.
basically i have found even if you dont explicitly specify to enable compression on a drive, it happens anyway!!!! the logic of file compression would dictate that a file is reduced in size to save space, when it is accessed it transparently and seamlessly deflates, (unpacks) on the fly for the system to use, then after its done with compresses again, now in anyones terms that is a lot of I/O traffic on the system.....ok back to my story...read on for advice at end.
ok so after about 30mins of uncompressing the entire drive, its done. so i cross my fingers and reboot hoping this will undo the evil once in a lifetime freak of a corruption that occurred before....get to the stage where it normally bsods,......and yes...it turns blue one more time. now i am deflated, dunno about all those files. oh well.
o so it couldnt undo it...but now i got to thinking of my new ghosted effort and the future....what is it all of us bf2ers want, well for me, apart from the bugs within the game fixed, beside that, i want a lean and clean and efficient a environment to play bf2 in and squeeze every little ounce of performace out of it i can, god knows it needs it.
so i re-ghost my mostly goody back, tinker a bit...happy with that...so then i do this uncompression thing on this drive.
reboot, no probs.
i notice everything is a little bit more responsive, now you guys will say you have a freshly ghosted system...true but that is my point of comparison most days anyway, so i mean over and above that...turns out hundred and thousands of files were compressed, which i knew about, but hadnt fathomed in on the whys and wherefore and the impact they could have
think about it, your bf2 directory with all the files compressed, you crank up the game, each time a file is requested, could be a cached geometry or terrain file, a sound file, punkbuster file, you name it, it is being out through the mill, firstly by having to be held and for it to ask windows to uncompress it.......then allow it time to play...then after finito, ask windows to compress it back...now in my books thats ludicrous for something that demands instantaneous free use of files very quickly! why not stop that happening all the time.
well i decided to opt into this, and have to report for me i believe there is a performance gain...nothing massive, but something constant and low-level.
being a fair type of guy i have to also report that before uncompression my total used figure for my hard drive was 13gb used. after uncompressing everything this rose to 14.5gb a fairly substantial rise.....but with most modern systems youve got the hard drive space, and if you are like amd most other bf2 players use NTFS as youe xp file system it could even be good news, as ntfs gets more effiecient at its job the more data it has to work with.
ok so for those who have survived this quick typing tyrade before i forget it all...here comes the how to implement this on your system bit:
1. backup ure system...so i cant be blamed.
2. bring up a cmd prompt and type this: compact /u /i /f /s:c:\
3. press enter, prepare to wait from 30mins + depending on hardware.
4. dont do it in safe mode, well you can, but it takes about 4 times longer.
note the drive letter c: at end needs to be adjusted if u have dif letter.
after it finishes do this;
bring up a cmd prompt and type: compact /u /s:c:\ .
IMPORTANT, this will not go through all of that again, this is instantaneous. this simply tells files not to compress in drive c in the future.
but you must type it exactly as i have written it, that is a space after the backslash at the end then a full stop then enter
this next thing is optional, if you never want to have file compression happen on yuor system again by accident open regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches
right click on the main key named VolumeCaches and choose export and save as VolumeCaches.reg somewhere safe. this is solely so you can easily restore it if needed ever.
once you have done that right click on the sub key folder below VolumeCaches and delete the entry called "compress old files"
thats it then exit.
then to completely eliminate the compression automatially happening do this:
go to your inbuilt search in xp, specify your system drive to search in, the file name you want to search for is compact.exe
choose options to search hdden files and folder, and system files. then you should find a couple of instances are returned in search.
firstly rename the compact.exe in the dllcache folder to compact.exe.bak if you do it on the one in your system32 folder it will just return, do the dllcache one first
then the system32 next and then any others, basically you are just appending the .bak extension into their filenames: compact.exe.bak
after that that is it, but windows file checker will prompt you saying an unrecognized file if found...just cause you have renamed them...just click cancel when it asks you if you want windows to replace it, then it will ask you if you want to keep these unrecognized versions...YES to that and that is it. REBOOT. phew
adam
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