I have been using the Windows 8 Developer Preview for about 5 months or so and in order to install it on my PC, I had to create a rather small partition on my primary hard drive consisting of only about 16GB. Thankfully, a clean install of Windows 8 will fit comfortably within that space and still provide enough room for some basic utilities and drivers (of course, I do have other secondary partitions that I use for installing applications).
During the installation of a particular application, the free disk space on the partition dropped to about 28MB. One of the users over in the Root Access chat room suggested that I try filling the disk until it is completely full and then blogging about what happens – hence this article. I was a bit reluctant at first since I didn’t want the hassle of reinstalling anything if it became corrupted somehow, but since I have up to date backups of everything, I decided to proceed anyway.
The first step was to run Disk Cleanup to make sure that the disk wasn’t full of a bunch of transient temporary files or something silly like that. Then the next step was to actually fill the disk. This sounds like an easy task, but Windows is pretty good at preventing the disk from becoming full in the first place. After filling the disk to within 500KB, I suddenly discover that Windows has managed to free 300MB on its own. This shocked me because I had just run Disk Cleanup and there was (as far as I was concerned) very little that Windows could remove. I did however receive a notification in the system tray:
I began filling up the remaining 300MB of disk space with more files and finally managed to get the disk to 0 bytes of free space for a brief moment:
As you can see, the drive is completely full. But not so fast – I had hardly finished doing this when Windows somehow (miraculously) managed to free up another 308MB of space on the drive. I was beginning to wonder what was getting deleted at this point since I had no idea what was on the disk that took up so much space yet was not needed and could be deleted. Still puzzled, I filled the disk up once again and began launching programs and doing things that I would normally do to see if anything was broken or wouldn’t work. The results were quite interesting.
The first application I tried, Notepad++, was completely unhelpful since it would happily report that it saved a text document – only to find out later that it had silently failed and created a completely blank document. Another text editor, PowerPad, was a little bit more helpful when trying to save a file when there was not enough room:
The error message does contain the root of the problem though the additional technical details aren’t really helpful to an end user. When trying to save a web page with Internet Explorer 10, I was pleasantly surprised to see the following:
This error message was simple but completely accurate – a very good example of what an application should do when it encounters such an error. I began to try a few other applications and all of them were able to at least start without crashing or running into an unrecoverable error. iTunes was able to load my library and play / stream music though it did warn me:
Some more experimentation revealed little other interesting results – applications worked fine until they attempted to write to the disk in which case they would present some form of error message (well, all except for Notepad++). However, I was surprised to discover that every time Windows tried to scavenge some free space, it never touched the recycle bin which had about 30.1MB of data in it. I would have thought that would be one of the first places Windows would look to free space.
After I was satisfied that my experiment was finished, I deleted all of the files I had used to fill the drive and I am sure I heard the PC breathe a sigh of relief as free disk space shot up to a more reasonable number.
In closing, I would like to share a rather curious message that popped up once I had finished with my experiment and was deleting files:
Some have heard about DNS and perhaps once configured in a router without knowing what it is or how it works. Others might know it, but haven’t considered to use another DNS server than the one of their ISP. This is what I will go through in this blog post.
DNS simply stands for Domain Name System, which is a hierarchy of Name Servers that have the intent to translate host names into IP addresses on a global scale. A name server hosts and/or caches these translations. In the case where they are at least hosted, the name server is often called a “DNS Server”. If you gave the host name superuser.com to a DNS server, it would give you an IP back. In our case, that would be something like 64.34.119.12.
How does it work?
The following image by Nirlog.com explains this very well:
Can you give an explicit example?
Let me give you an example on resolving superuser.com in a non-cached way:
The name server that I use is
192.168.1.1; this is my local router which caches DNS entries. I gave it a Hosts file to reroute malicious domains. Here is an example, although I am using a different one which I can’t find anymore. I might update this post later to include it though…The router has the name servers 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8 set, known as Google Public DNS.
Google Public DNS will contact authoritative root name servers (ARN), which are the top of the DNS hierarchy. Then Google DNS will contact the
.comname servers, the IP of which it received from the ARNs. After that, Google DNS will contact the DNS server forsuperuser.com, the IP of which it received from.com.A simple run of
whoisreveals:NS1.SERVERFAULT.COM NS2.SERVERFAULT.COM NS3.SERVERFAULT.COMThe IPs for these name servers are known as they are registered at the
.comname server. When you register a new domain, you always have to fill in the DNS servers that you use, along with their IP.Google DNS will contact the DNS servers of
superuser.comto find the IP ofsuperuser.com, after which we finally get the IP I mentioned above:nslookup superuser.com NS1.SERVERFAULT.COM Server: NS1.SERVERFAULT.COM Address: 64.34.119.33 Name: superuser.com Address: 64.34.119.12
Where can I find more information on DNS?
I would suggest you to read through Domain Name System and Name Servers for more details.
The name server terms are also used in different contexts, read Spiff’s answer for more.
So, as there is more than one DNS server, can I pick a different one?
It is a common misconception that an ISP that is closer to you is always faster and more secure: A short distance does not make up speed on its own nor does it make up security. Compare using the old single network cables out of metal to the newer multiple glass fibre cables systems, used in connections like EuroDOCSIS 3.0.
Other than propagation delay, you also have a processing delay on the server; I’m pretty sure that the DNS server at an ISP is less powerful to a DNS server hosted by Google, hence it is completely possible or a server that’s at a much greater distance will actually be faster than your ISP’s DNS server.
Hosting your DNS router/server yourself might be the fastest, though it wouldn’t have all the DNS records stored, which would make it not usable to surf the internet!
namebench by Google can help you pick out a better DNS server:
Are you a power-user with 5 minutes to spare? Do you want a faster internet experience?
Try out namebench. It hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use. namebench runs a fair and thorough benchmark using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. namebench is completely free and does not modify your system in any way. This project began as a 20% project at Google.
namebench runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and UNIX, and is available with a graphical user interface as well as a command-line interface.
Here is the most important screen you will see when using namebench:
See their website for more screens. There is also a command line version available.
As an alternative, there is also DNS-Benchmark by GRC.
Caution though, it could be that DNS servers result in slower browser experience in some cases, but as I haven’t seen scientific proof on that, I would take that with a grain of salt. Many people have used more popular DNS servers like Google Public DNS and OpenDNS and haven’t had a problem with it. They are extremely fast and secure and I don’t notice any negative speed differences when surfing myself (with Google DNS).
Out of curiosity over a question I saw on Ask Different, I created a poll on web browsers for you. My main goal is to find out why people use one browser over another. Is it actually better, or do you just use it because it’s the default browser? The survey is for users of all OSes, including iOS and Android. We will come back in a couple of weeks to post the results from the survey.
Please feel free to take the survey multiple times if you regularly use multiple operating systems. You can visit my survey on Google Docs here.
You can take a look at the final results in this Google Docs spreadsheet.
Have you ever heard of a link like http://2915189091? Don’t worry, not a shock site…
While this does not always work in every browser (eg. some versions of Firefox), it does work in most browsers like MSIE and Google Chrome. It really depends on the implementation of how the URL is parsed, Firefox seems to not go beyond our usual ways to type a URL.
This is all about how the URL is stored. Many of you know that you can also access Google through their IP, eg. http://173.194.65.99. Now let’s see how much data storage that IP requires. As one character is 1 byte for ASCII, it takes 13 bytes to store the IP address. Or with Unicode (UTF-16) you will need the double, 26 bytes. Another way to store the IP is by taking each number and storing that apart, resulting in unsigned octets from 0 to 255 which each take a single byte, so that totals out at 4 bytes.
The purpose of the Super User Community Blog is to highlight what you want to see.
We are always excited to bring new writers and editors to the Super User Community Blog; so, if you are interested in contributing, please let us know! There are various ways in which you can contribute — ranging from your own stories to product reviews, tips and beyond. Don’t be afraid that you don’t come up with an idea because we already have some ready for you, but you are always welcome to share your own ideas…
Writing a blog post is simple:
- Register at Trello and leave us a message in the Super User Blog Editor Room with your Trello user name, we’ll set up access for you so that you can see our ideas and share your progress. Consider bookmarking both links for your convenience.
- You can start writing your post while you wait, we can later import it from any format into the WordPress Dashboard. Keep us up to date on your progress, so we can give you access to our WordPress Dashboard after you have shown a first draft, as well as proof-read and schedule your final version.
- The Blog Editor Room and Trello are our main communication points about the blog, feel free to share your progress in either. Remember that we are here to help you…
- Have fun! Enjoy expressing yourself, as well as being part of the Super User Community.
From idea to draft to finished post.
Blog posts mainly develop out of ideas and questions, for some you might have to do some research. From that point on you can think up the different paragraphs you will write in a draft, then it’s a matter of writing and rewriting them. Just writing one paragraph after another might not cut it for some…
Add some nice pictures for those that are easily distracted, get at least two other editors to proof read the blog post and we’ll schedule it for you. Please note that we don’t publish blog posts immediately, but intend to spread out the posts such that we regularly have new content and they are published at an optimal time. We’ll do this for you.
Don’t have a fear of writing, you know you have been doing it before!
Well, this is the final post in this 3-parter!
In the previous picture at the end of part 2, there are a couple of clearly visible mistakes in cabling that I didn’t notice at the time. I didn’t notice them because they weren’t the type of mistakes that cause breakage, but just were unnecessary. The first was that I used both Crossfire bridges with the graphics cards. Only one gets used between two cards anyway, so I was able to remove one of them (the second one is if was going to hook up a third graphics card). The second mistake was that I ran a PCI-e power cable to the motherboard’s PCI-e power connection. This power connection is useful if the PCI-e cards don’t have external power and aren’t getting enough power from the PCI-e rails as it is. But since my graphics cards do already draw external power,
So, at this point, I had a usable computer. Since I was pretty burned out by the hours I spent working on it already, I didn’t want to dive right back in and started using it a bit more. Besides, I didn’t know I wasn’t done yet (aside from knowing I was missing a multi-card reader, which I need). There was also the fact that the hard drive cage was laying out on the floor and it was somewhat annoying. But that was stuff I was willing to deal with in the short term, as I wanted to get working on setting up the software in my newly built PC. After using it for a few days and discussing the project with friends and coworkers, I started thinking about things I could do to improve it.
So, earlier this year I decided that I would build a PC for the first time. Previously, I had only done component upgrades on prebuilt computers. This got me familiar with working inside a computer case, but I never had built one from scratch, so I had to figure out what is involved with choosing components, matching things together to make sure everything is compatible, and what it’s like to do all the subsequent tweaking and troubleshooting when the inevitable problems arise.
Super Users often find ourselves installing operating systems. Whether you run your own computer shop, manage an army of thousands of corporate workstations, or are just the tech-savvy friend everyone you know calls for help, you’ve probably had to install various flavors of Windows over and over again. Most of us have also spent a fair amount of time installing different Linux distros, running data recovery disks, and using various live CDs.
The problem that presents itself is managing all of the required disks. There are at least 6 common flavors of Windows 7 alone (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate for both x86 and x64, plus Enterprise for you corporate types). Add in various distros of Linux and you start to see why some computer techs carry around whole folders of CDs.
I’ve been aware of Pendrive Linux for a while, which lets you setup a flash drive with multiboot Linux software, and can add a single Windows installation. But what if you wanted to have a single flash drive with all versions of Windows 7, as well as all the standard Linux boot disks? It took some work, but I decided to do this and the final result is impressive.
