So a friend and I decided that we wanted to play a game together, so we picked a game called FlatOut2, because Re-Volt does not like Windows 7 64-bit. After the installation of the game ends it says that you need to install some protect drivers, which are being blocked by Windows, because they are not signed. Left without no choice I just cancel the installation of these drivers. I find out the game works fine without.
On my friends computer though, the installation of the drivers is not blocked and they install fine and asks to reboot the machine, he reboots it and now he is met by a friendly screen saying that Windows cannot boot and it will try to repair it, though without finding any solutions to the problem. Failsafe mode does not work, deleting the game from recovery console does not help either; he had to reinstall.
Since I did not install the drivers I did not reboot my machine until today, a couple of days after the incident with his machine, exactly the same problem. I had to reinstall Windows 7 on my machine as well.
Strange thing about this is that I had FlatOut2 installed on the same Windows 7 installation before and then I did not have any problems, how the heck can a simple game screw the installation up so much?
Anyways, my advice is to omit this game and not install it at all if, unless you want to reinstall Windows on your computer.
Posted by Tomasz Cielecki at 12:24 am on March 3rd, 2010.
Tags: Drivers, FlatOut2, Games, Install, Windows, Windows 7.
So you might think, where did your 10 GB worth of disk space go? Did it disappear, what is using it? The answer is, temporary files and logs ate it! I found out that I had 15 GB worth of logs and other shit on my disk that I did not need. So I searched through it and made a small batch script deleting the stuff. You might say that you can use programs like ccleaner or so, but if you do not want to install these programs you will be served well with a small script running from time to time, deleting files ending with a specified extension. So here goes my script:
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| del /f /s /q %tmp%\.
rd /s/q %tmp%\
del /f /s /q %temp%\.
rd /s /q %temp%\
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*._mp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.log
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.old
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.dmp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.tmp |
You can of course specify more extensions if you want to… Have fun with the script!
Posted by Tomasz Cielecki at 1:51 am on February 7th, 2010.
Tags: Crap, Delete, Disk, Files, Temporary, Windows.
As you might know Skype has been out for GNU/Linux for a very long time. It supports video and all kinds of stuff, which is very useful. It is all good, and works pretty well. Some might know the fancy feature that comes with Windows Vista per default. That is the possibility to turn the volume up and down for single applications, which is where Pulseaudio comes into the picture. This is a simmilar soundsystem for GNU/Linux that has existed for quite a while now, and ships with many of the big distributions.
Most applications work out of the box with Pulseaudio, some does not. Yes you are right, Skype does not work right out of the box with Pulseaudio, but with a quick configuration it works perfectly fine.
If you have not already a ~/.asoundrc file, make it. The following should go in this file:
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}
pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}
First two sections make Pulseaudio the default audio system. The two last sections are making Skype able to select Pulseaudio. This might work for other applications also. When this is done and alsa and pulseaudio is restarted, start Skype and go to Options>Sound Devices
And change all the settings to pulse. Starting the Pulseaudio volume manager and trying to call a friend or making a testcall, shows that Skype appears in the list of applications using Pulseaudio.
Posted by Tomasz Cielecki at 7:51 pm on December 13th, 2008.
Tags: Alsa, audio, Linux, OSS, Pulseaudio, Skype, Vista, Windows.