About a month ago I took delivery of a new, much faster PC from PC Specialist. Now I’m getting around to reinstalling games, and I’ve just discovered a neat trick to install Steam-powered games on a second hard drive.
My last PC had served me well for about six years but it was creaking a little around the seams and was being pushed very hard particularly when gaming. It was time to upgrade.
And after upgrades comes the often arduous task of reinstalling applications.
dual-boot or not dual-boot?
On my last two PCs I’ve always set up a dual-boot environment. One partition (C:) was for day-to-day applications (email, web browsing, web development, image editing, etc.), the next (D:) was for games. My reasoning was:
Clean installation of Windows with minimal, and only essential, drivers.
Less distracting. If I wanted to play games then I would need to reboot the PC into the games partition.
However, in practice what it meant was:
Twice as much work, keeping two versions of Windows up-to-date, with both Windows updates and driver upgrades.
It was such a hassle to shut down everything and reboot that I rarely ever played any games. The only people to play were Reuben and Joshua when they played the LEGO Star Wars games.
So I decided on this PC to single-boot (Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit) and install everything side-by-side across two hard drives: my main applications are on C: (120 GB SSD); most of my data plus games are on D: (1 TB Western Digital SATA drive).
So far, so good. I’ve played games more in the last couple of weeks than in the last couple of years, but contrary to my fears it’s not distracted me from my main work on my PC.
However, this evening I realised after installing the Steam client for the first time that it was about to install all 7.8 GB of Call of Duty: Black Ops onto C.
No, no, no, no, no!
Moving Steam to a second hard drive
It turned out to be a pretty easy task to move Steam from C to D. I found the instructions on the Steam support website.
By default Steam installs to C:\Program Files\Steam (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam on 64-bit editions of Windows) and the games install to C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps.
“During the installation of Steam, you have the option to install Steam to a location other than the default. Since Steam relies on the game files residing in the SteamApps folder, your game files will go to whatever folder you have Steam installed in. The game files must be in the SteamApps folder in order to function.”
So, here’s what to do, assuming that you’ve already installed Steam to C:.
Log out and exit Steam.
Navigate to the folder where Steam is installed (by default: C:\Program Files\Steam\; or C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\ on 64-bit).
Delete all of the files and folders except the SteamApps folder and Steam.exe.
Cut and paste your Steam folder to the new location, for example: D:\Program Files\Steam\.
Launch Steam.
Steam will briefly update and then you will be ready to play.
In a few weeks time I’ll be migrating my data to a new PC and since my two older boys, twins Reuben and Joshua, love playing
LEGO Star Wars I & II: The Complete Saga
LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars
LEGO The Lord of the Rings
I was keen to make sure I knew how to reliably transfer their current saved games to the new computer when it arrived.
Current v future setups
My current PC setup sees me dual booting between Windows 8 Professional 64-bit (on C:) and Windows 7 Professional 32-bit (on D:).
The first partition is my main day-to-day setup for web development, email, writing, image editing, sound recording, etc. The second is simply known as “the games computer”: it has a very clean installation of Windows 7 with only the essential drivers installed plus a few games.
I’ve yet to decide exactly how to configure my new PC, but I expect that I’ll drop the dual boot and simply run everything under Windows 8 Pro 64-bit.
So over the last couple of days I’ve installed these three favourite games of the boys and trialled copying the saved games over. And I’m delighted to report that it worked.
Process
What I did was:
Back-up the files (as detailed below) on my Windows 7 installation.
Install each game on my Windows 8 installation.
Run the game, so that it could create new save locations.
Back-up the default save location files.
Overwrite the Windows 8 save location files with the ones I’d backed-up from Windows 7.
And it worked!
LEGO Star Wars I & II: The Complete Saga
Here is the directory that I found all the files that I needed to copy, where {USER} is the name of your Windows Vista, 7 or 8 account:
C:\Users\{USER}\AppData\Local\Lucasarts\LEGO Star Wars - The Complete Saga\
It contained the following directory and files, as we had used only one save slot:
\SavedGames
\SaveGame0.LEGO Star Wars - The Complete Saga_SavedGame
\Mappings.dat
\pcconfig.txt
As far as I can tell the SaveGame0.LEGO Star Wars - The Complete Saga_SavedGame file stores the actual game progress: characters unlocked, canisters found, bonus levels accessed, etc; Mappings.dat stores any customisations made to keyboard and gamepad controls; and pcconfig.txt stores information such as screen resolution, graphics and sound customisations.
It contained the following directory and files again we had used only one save slot:
\CachedShaders
(1,100 files with hex address filenames, e.g. 0x00ae4b5d.shader)
\SavedGames
\Slot1
\GAME1.LEGOStarWarsIIISaveGameData
\Mappings.dat
\pcconfig.txt
I didn’t copy over the CachedShaders files, but I let the game build the cache again afresh. The other two files were the same as above: games controls plus video and sound configurations.
LEGO The Lord of the Rings
Lastly, I copied over our progress in the Lord of the Rings by access these files:
C:\Users\Games\AppData\Roaming\Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment\LEGO The Lord of the Rings\
which consisted of these files:
\CachedShaders
(278 files with hex address filenames plus .shader, .pcode and .vcode suffixes)
\SavedGames
\Slot1
\game1.legothelordoftheringssavegamedata
\Slot4
game1.legothelordoftheringssavegamedata
\Mappings.dat
\pcconfig.txt
Again, I didn’t copy over the CachedShaders files, but I let the game build the cache again afresh. The other two files were the same as above: games controls plus video and sound configurations.
My old PSU sitting on my desk, post-operation, alongside Reuben’s toolkit.
Early on Sunday morning I switch on my PC and nothing happened. Nothing. Not a sound. Not a spark. Nothing. All a bit worrying really given that I wanted to get some prayers off my hard drive for use in the 08:00 service that morning.
Troubleshooting
I tried not to panic and think about it logically. What could the problem be? Okay, the power comes into the power supply unit which then feeds the motherboard and the various components (DVD, hard drives, graphics card, soundcard, USB devices, etc.) But the PSU is in standby mode until it’s supplied with a load which only happens when I push the on/off switch. There are my first two candidates: PSU and switch. And it it’s not them then I guess it could be the motherboard?
I took a look at the switch. It looked and sounded fairly solid. I then hunted down another power cable and swapped that out. Maybe the fuse had gone, I reasoned. And remarkably, my PC started (after two or three failed attempts). That immediately ruled out a dodgy motherboard.
It was looking more and more likely that the PSU was the source of the problem.
Review
So I searched online for the make and model of my then-current PSU: EZCOOL ATX-600JSP and was astonished to read a review on Amazon UK which described something very close to the problems that I had been experiencing for the last couple of years.
For the last couple of years I’ve had a intermittent issues whereby I’d switch on the PC and it would start only to switch itself off a few seconds into the boot sequence. I’d put it down to my not pressing the button hard enough, or even thinking that perhaps there was a problem with the button itself.
For the love of all things holy, don’t buy this power supply. Hamsters on running wheels are a more reliable source of power than this.
Fortunately, I didn’t buy this. I borrowed it from a friend as my old PSU was only 450W and couldn’t handle my new NVIDIA 8800 GTX graphics card.
For about a month, everything was fine. Admittedly sometimes the computer wouldn’t turn on, but it did after pressing the button again and I attributed that to the case rather than the PSU.
However, after this time of false happiness, I was using my computer one day and the power just died. I was surprised but assumed it was a power surge or something similar. Then after a while it would cut out as the computer was turning on or within the first few minutes of running. It was fairly annoying having to have two or three attempts to turn my computer on, and this happened more often than not.
After getting used to this for another couple of weeks, the thing really started to die, a few days ago it turned itself off twenty times, accompanied by a worrying fizzing sound. I tried switching power cables but this made no difference whatsoever. Now it’s more useful as a doorstop and I look forward to destroying the damn thing.
In the last few days I have bought and installed a new Corsair HX series PSU, which never turns off, drastically improved the performance of my computer and is actually silent, unlike this one which claims to be but is far from it. An added bonus is that the inside of my computer no longer looks like a jungle thanks to the modular cabling. The Corsair is highly recommended and is well worth the money, albeit a fairly large sum.
Cheap things are cheap for a reason. Please save yourself the trouble.
Reuben helped me to fit it; what a sweetie! You can see from the photo above that he brought his own toolkit to my desk to help.
The operation was pretty straightforward:
Unplug everything from the back (and front) of my PC.
Remove the two side covers.
With anti-static wristband on, carefully remove the existing power connectors: the motherboard had two (24-pin and 4-pin), graphics card (6-pin), soundcard breakout box and floppy drive (small 4-pin), DVD drives (molex 4-pin), SATA hard drives (SATA connectors).
Unscrew and remove the old PSU.
Fit new PSU.
Carefully attach the new cables.
The Corsair website was useful in discovering that I had to split the new 8-pin connector marked “CPU” so that it could fit the 4-pin ATX 12V socket on the motherboard.
Screw the PC sides back on.
Connect the cables again,
Switch on… and pray that it works.
It did! My PC is now disconcertingly quiet. It starts up with a whirring flurry of noise before almost immediately dropping down to an almost inaudible whisper. So quiet was it the first couple of times that I thought my PC had switched itself off. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the screen flicker into life and I watched the power-on startup test (POST) begin.
Next…
Having recently upgraded my RAM too—doubling it from 4GB to 8GB—which involved some first class customer service from Crucial, my PC is slowly getting a new lease of life. Not had for a machine that I bought about five or six years ago:
Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU
Crucial 8GB DDR2-667 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB graphics card
Next up, I want to upgrade the graphics card from an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (still a remarkably capable graphics card) to something more powerful. I’ll be sure to report back.
When I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro I wanted to make sure that I could still play DVDs. Now that I have upgraded I’ve moved from using Windows Media Player to VLC media player. Here’s why.
Having read up a little about Windows 8′s support of various media I was fairly confident that if I installed the Windows Media Center then I would be able to continue to play DVDs in Windows Media Player, as I did in Windows 7. I was wrong.
Having bought the upgrade early (back in October 2012) I was offered a free upgrade to Windows Media Centre — woop! — which saved me a whole £6.99. However, as I discovered, it only enables DVD playback in Windows Media Centre, not Windows Media Player.
On my old Windows XP machine I used Cyberlink PowerDVD, which costs between £30-£70 depending; I got it free, bundled with my graphics card, if I remember correctly. It was fairly easy to use, and the controls were pretty intuitive. When I moved to Windows 7 I discovered that this version of the software wasn’t compatible with that version of Windows and I was reluctant to pay for an upgrade and so I started to use Windows Media Player, which had a really terrible, confusing interface but was free.
And so once again another Windows upgrade requires me to find another application that will enable me to watch DVDs on my PC. A quick Google search suggested that I try VLC media player.
VLC media player ticked both boxes: it’s free and it’s really easy to use. The interface is incredibly clear, much simpler than Windows Media Player 10 and 11, and it’s incredibly fast.
I also really like that the software is created by the VideoLAN organisation, “a project and a non-profit organization, composed of volunteers, developing and promoting free, open-source multimedia solutions.”
I definitely recommend VLC media player, if you are looking for a free, user-friendly replacement for Windows Media Player on Windows 8 (or, indeed, any version of Windows from XP SP2 onwards).
Creative X-Fi Platinum soundcard, breakout box and remote control
Having run the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my laptop for about six months I was certain that when the final version was released I would definitely upgrade my desktop PC to Windows 8 Pro. And given that there is no good time to upgrade I did it at the latter end of last week, mainly to take my mind off the unpleasantness of recovering from the ‘flu.
I chose to do a ‘clean’ installation, reformatting partition C: in the process of the install, which worked nicely even with my upgrade DVD. At no point did I need to prove to Windows that I did indeed have a legitimate version of Windows 7 that I was upgrading from. (I do, by the way.)
No sound
It all appeared to be going swimmingly well until I suddenly realised that I had no sound. Which was strange as the Windows Vista soundcard drivers installed without fuss and… well, I say that there was a strange few minutes after I’d installed them and rebooted whereby the speakers were continually hissing.
Poking around in the Control Panel Sound applet I discovered that the “Recording” tab had Line-In 2/Mic 2 activated, which appeared to be the source of the hiss.
Reboot.
No hiss. In fact, no sound at all. This time on the “Playback” tab SPDIF Out had been selected rather than speakers.
I discovered that I could coax the sound back if I fired up the Creative Audio Control Panel application and manually change the playback mode. After each reboot the soundcard was ‘forgetting’ the settings and returning to game mode and 2.1 speakers, rather than entertainment mode and 5.1 speakers.
I uninstalled the drivers again, and this time discovered on the Creative website a Windows 7 and Windows 8 driver availability chart. There is currently no final Windows 8 driver for this soundcard, but they have a beta driver…
Uninstall, re-install. Same problem: a forgetful soundcard.
The workaround I’m currently using is to use a free, third-party application called X-Fi Mode Changer from Spectra9 to automatically set the playback mode each time Windows reboots.
So far, for me, this has worked without fail. I do hope, though, that Creative are able to address these issues with the final driver for Windows, which their website says should be available in late-December 2012. I’m not holding my breathe for it, but I am thankful for this workaround.
For the last few years I’ve been using Dropbox, a service that offers online file storage (often called ‘cloud storage’) and synchronisation. But in the last few weeks two new services have been launched by a couple of big names: Microsoft SkyDrive and Google Drive.
I’ve been looking into these two services and trying to decide for myself whether I should move away from Dropbox or use SkyDrive and/or Google Drive in addition to Dropbox.
For me the important things are:
Storage space for the price
Speed of synchronisation
Ability to choose which files to synchronise on which devices
For those who don’t already understand what Dropbox, SkyDrive or Google Drive are. A brief explanation.
So, if I save a file in my Dropbox folder it automatically gets uploaded to an online account From any web browser I can then log in to my Dropbox account and download any file that I’ve uploaded. That’s the ‘cloud storage’ bit.
Not only that, any other device (such as my laptop or work PC) that is connected to my Dropbox account automatically downloads that file into its Dropbox folder. That’s the ‘synchronisation’ bit.
Comparisons
Dropbox
Storage
Month
Year
2GB+
Free
Free
50GB+
£6.25
£75
100GB+
£12.50
£150
(All prices are in US dollars, converted using Oanda, and rounded to the nearest 5p.)
Earn extra space: Dropbox users can earn more space for free by referring new users to Dropbox up to (I think) 32GB.
File limits: Files uploaded to Dropbox via the desktop application have no file size limit. Files uploaded through the website must be 300 MB or less.
Speed: When I drop a new file into my Dropbox folder it takes only a few seconds before the sync starts. Synchronisation time is fairly quick (you can customise whether bandwidth is limited or not for both upload and download).
Dropbox also supports LAN sync, which is brilliant! Basically, it speeds up synchronisation across computers on the same network by transferring files across the network rather than downloading them from the Dropbox servers.
Customisation: Which folders and sub-folders are synchronised can be fully controlled, which for me is essential. Dropbox calls this “Selective Sync”.
The desktop client offers a lot of options and tweaking. It is rather a joy to use, as is the website interface.
Integration: There is no built-in office application support with Dropbox. But there are a number of online apps and browser extensions that will sync with your Dropbox account.
SkyDrive
Storage
Month
Year
7GB (or 25GB†)
Free
Free
+ 20GB
£0.50
£6.00
+50GB
£1.33
£16.00
+100GB
£2.66
£32.00
(All prices are in GB sterling, paid yearly; monthly prices are shown for comparison.)
† Existing SkyDrive users were given the option to keep their existing 25GB when the service was revamped and relaunched in April 2012.
File limits: Files uploaded to SkyDrive via the desktop application are limited to 2GB. Files uploaded through the website must be 300 MB or less.
Speed: When I drop a new file into my SkyDrive folder it seems to take quite a while before the sync starts, noticeably longer than either Dropbox or Google Drive. Synchronisation time is fairly quick (you cannot customise bandwidth limiting).
Customisation: The only options that the desktop client offers are “Make files on this PC available to me on my other devices” and “Start SkyDrive automatically when I sign in to Windows”. When my PC first starts up it seems to take ages for SkyDrive to go through its initial checks and synchronisation.
Selective synchronisation is not available, which means that whatever you upload will always be available on each computer you synchronise with. For me this is a problem, I only want certain files to be available on my work PC, for example. Perhaps this will be made available in a future release.
Integration: What is really nice about SkyDrive is that I can open, edit and create Microsoft Office files (including OneNote) directly within SkyDrive using the Web app versions of Microsoft Office, which makes the experience feel familiar.
Google Drive
Storage
Month
Year
5GB
Free
Free
25GB
£1.50
£18.00
100GB
£3.15
£37.80
200GB
£6.25
£75.00
400GB
£12.50
£150.00
(All prices are in US dollars, converted using Oanda, and rounded to the nearest 5p.)
File limits: Files uploaded to Google Drive via the desktop application are limited to 10GB. Uploaded document files that are converted to Google documents format can’t be larger than 2MB.
An important point to note is that Google Docs (that is any file that is created as in Google’s proprietary format for documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms or drawings or is uploaded and then converted into a Google Doc format) do not count against your total storage. So, you could effectively use a 5GB free account but also have, say, 10GB of files in Google Doc format.
Speed: When I drop a new file into my Google Drive folder it takes only a few moments before the sync starts; comparable with Dropbox, which is a good thing. Synchronisation time is fairly quick (you cannot customise bandwidth limiting).
Customisation: The only options that the desktop client offers are “Make files on this PC available to me on my other devices” and “Start SkyDrive automatically when I sign in to Windows”. When my PC first starts up it seems to take ages for SkyDrive to go through its initial checks and synchronisation.
Selective synchronisation is available, but not to the same degree of granularity as Dropbox offers. It would appear from the Google Drive preferences that only top-level folders can be selected or deselected. So if I want to sync my “Reference” folder, for example, with my laptop then I need to synchronise everything within it; with Dropbox I could select which sub-folders to sync. Perhaps this will be made available in a future release.
Integration: What is nice about Google Drive is that I can convert a lot of formats into Google Docs format, admittedly mostly Microsoft Office formats but that suits me fine. I can then view, edit and print them. I can also open PDF files directly in Google Docs, and I can attempt to use OCR to convert a PDF into an editable document.
Evaluations
Based on a 100GB+ account, on price per gigabyte Dropbox is by far the most expensive (SkyDrive 32p/GB per year; Google Drive 38p/GB per year; Dropbox £1.50/GB per year). Plus Dropbox doesn’t offer any integration with office applications in the same way that Microsoft SkyDrive and Google Drive do.
However, Dropbox has been in the game since September 2008 and has built quite a strong reputation for its stability, its ease-of-use, its speed and the features it offers. The drill-down selective sync and the LAN sync, in particular, are very useful for me.
While SkyDrive was officially launched in August 2007 it didn’t enjoy the same level of uptake or success that Dropbox did. One reason may have been due to the lack of desktop client.
The relaunch of SkyDrive in April 2012, only days apart from Google’s launch of Google Drive may change that but as it stands I think neither Google nor Microsoft’s desktop clients come anywhere close to the polish that Dropbox offers.
It will be interesting to see if Dropbox will continue to rely on its reputation and on the quality of its platform clients (remember Dropbox is also available for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry) or whether it will lower its prices as the competition from Google and Microsoft grows.
Limitations
Truly selective sync: What a shame is that none of these three services allow me to select which folders on my PC (regardless of where they are) I can synchronise. I can only synchronise the contents of my Dropbox folder, and my SkyDrive folder, and my Google Drive folder.
What would be really nice is to be able to say: I want to sync everything within:
D:\Music\
E:\Photos\Family
F:\Code\Personal
etc.
Maybe in the future…
Encryption: And what about encryption? Currently none of these services offer any kind of data encryption
Your files are stored somewhere out there, in the cloud, completely unencrypted. Which means that if someone else got hold of them then they could read them with the minimum of effort.
While I don’t store any state secrets on my PC, it’s still the principle of the matter: ideally, I want my data to remain only mine and for me to choose with whom to share it.
AND THE WINNER IS…
A few months ago I upgraded to the 50GB account (approx. £6.25 per month) which meant that I kept my 4.75GB that I’d accumulated from my 2GB free account plus referrals and added an extra 50GB.
If either Microsoft SkyDrive or Google Drive allowed me to select which folders and sub-folders to synchronise, allowed me some control over the upload/download throttling speeds, and allowed me to synchronise files across my LAN (I often use my desktop PC and laptop at the same time) then I would likely move to a cheaper option.
If that was the case now then I’d move to Google, simply because of the lag time associated with the SkyDrive synchronisation. If they fixed that… well, I’ve already got 25GB free with them. That would save me £1.50 per year that I could otherwise spend on… I don’t know, a chocolate bar.
I use Dropbox a lot, and for now I intend to continue to use Dropbox as my primary cloud storage/synchronisation service.
I trust Dropbox.
Dropbox offers me the combination of speed and customisation at a price that I can afford.
But I will keep a close eye on both SkyDrive and Google Drive.
What have you decided about these, and perhaps other cloud-based services such as Apple iDrive?
