Can Vista sw...

[Rolf N]

...ap on a partition that has no drive letter assigned?
As far as my experiments went, XP didn't really want to do that. I could actually insert a dedicated partition for a TMP directory, without its own dirve letter, but swapping without dedicating a drive letter was a non-starter.

 

[Rainbow Man]

Pardon my cluelessness but what's the point of swapping on a partition without drive letter?

I didn't know windows could do anything on a drive without a letter attached to it. Drive letters have always been my pet peeve ever since I left my Amiga for the PC. Drive letters are jusrt dumb idiotic archaic artefacts that ought to have been nuked ages ago.
Peace.

 

[Blazkowicz]

yeah I remember in XP or 2k3 mounting a small FAT32 partition under C:\Swap, and being unable to put the swap file here. but here's what I did a few days ago :

gave the Z: letter to the new 2.5GB partition, set a 1.5GB swap file on it, change the TEMP and TMP environment variabled to Z:\temp.. then as I thought it wasn't needed in My Computer, I realized I could make it go away with TweakUI (My Computer / drives). I can still access Z: through a run box, cmd window or comp management but else it feels like it's not there.

I also plan to put MSDOS 7.10 on that swap partition and dual boot with XP. useful for BIOS /firmware flashes and a few other thing. (I'll be able to do some real DOS gaming again, got myself an Audigy 1 as it's the last one with DOS driver)

 

[Davros]

if you have the memory why not use a ram drive

I remember playing doom2 from one certainly loaded fast

 

[Aerows]

Pardon my cluelessness but what's the point of swapping on a partition without drive letter?

I didn't know windows could do anything on a drive without a letter attached to it. Drive letters have always been my pet peeve ever since I left my Amiga for the PC. Drive letters are jusrt dumb idiotic archaic artefacts that ought to have been nuked ages ago.
Peace.

Actually, even in the NT days it was a trick to copy your stuff out and then hide the drive letter. Also, it isn't necessary to map a drive, which qualifies as "without a drive letter".

UNC paths make the Windows world go around.

 

[Frank]

(I'll be able to do some real DOS gaming again, got myself an Audigy 1 as it's the last one with DOS driver)

Try the new DOSBox v.7. It's pretty sweet and fast, and so far ran everything I threw at it. You don't need things like MoSlow either.

 

[Colourless]

Dosbox is much better than real Dos for a lot of games. It lets you do things that you couldn't do with real dos (such as filtering output) and it's easier to get hard to run games to run in Dosbox. And of course no configuration problems and better SoundBlaster emulation than... well... all modern sound cards have. Might not be as fast as real Dos, but that's a good thing.

 

[Rainbow Man]

Hah! Thanks for posting about this program!

I got to play Duke3D again for the first timein about four or five years..
(I actually foudn a save file I'd named with a date from november 2000 and from my AMSD K6 days. OMG that was a long time agio.)

Okay so the game's crude by today's standard sbut Duke has aged a lot more gracefully than most gaes from hat era. It just needs decent mouse support and it's almost up to par (not considering the grainy textures which is just charming).

Peace.

 

[aaaaa00]

Pardon my cluelessness but what's the point of swapping on a partition without drive letter?

I didn't know windows could do anything on a drive without a letter attached to it. Drive letters have always been my pet peeve ever since I left my Amiga for the PC. Drive letters are jusrt dumb idiotic archaic artefacts that ought to have been nuked ages ago.
Peace.

The Windows kernel actually does EVERYTHING without drive letters. Drive letters are an artifact of the Win32 subsystem, and are manufactured entirely by it.

Unfortunately, Microsoft can't really nuke drive letters now, because practically every Win32 program would break.

Grab Winobj, and you can get a glimpse of what the "real" Windows kernel object namespace underneath the Win32 subsystem looks like.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/WinObj.mspx

Similar to Unix, the Windows kernel namespace actually starts at root "\". Storage devices are mounted under "\Device". So a file system volume in the system would be "\Device\HardDiskVolume1".

All of Win32's name space lives under a special directory called "\??".

What you see as "C:\foo.txt" in what you think of as "Windows" is actually "\??\C:\foo.txt". "\??\C:" is a symbolic link created by the Win32 subsystem of NT which points to the real volume. So the real path of your file is actually "\Device\HardDiskVolume1\foo.txt".

The filesystem and most of the kernel never sees Win32 paths like "C:" at all, it's just that the kernel namespace is normally so well hidden from Win32 that nobody knows it exists.

 

[aaaaa00]

UNC paths make the Windows world go around.

Actually UNC paths are another subset of Windows kernal paths.

Paths like "\\machine\share\foo.txt" are actually translated to "\??\UNC\machine\share\foo.txt" by Win32, and (you guessed it) "\??\UNC" is really a symbolic link that points off to "\Device\Mup", which is the device object created by the driver that handles network connections.

So the real path of this file is actually "\Device\Mup\machine\share\foo.txt".

 

[Rolf N]

I'll take that as a no then