My first Vista installation consumed 28 GB - without any additional programs beyond the OS. I had read reports of the large on-disk Vista footprint and allocated a seemingly whopping 60 GB for the boot partition, but I was still stunned by the size of the base installation.
While trying to understand what could possibly consume all this space, I stumbled upon an excellent open-source tool to quickly map the contents of my drives. WinDirStat is an amazing little program that visualizes the contents of directories, drives or groups of drives, either directly-attached or mapped on a network.
Continue reading "28 GB ?!?" »
In a recent burst of organization, I finally completed creating virtual CD (/DVD) images of my entire PC-CD collection, stretching back to 1994. The photo to the left does not even include many programs stored only in paper sleeves.
I started using Virtual CD
in 2000 when my young children were trashing game CDs with alarming -
and expensive! - frequency. This program adapted over the years in an
"arms race" with evolving anti-archive schemes. Fortunately the
emergence of server-side authentication has reduced the incidence of
annoying restrictions.
Continue reading "Virtual CDs" »
After my little '3 Keystrokes' fiasco I have deployed a more robust data protection and disaster recovery solution at home. This one is designed to be stupid-resistant. We'll see.
Continue reading "Personal DR" »
