Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 September 25

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September 25

Harddisk usage - something is clogging up a partition

Hello, does anyone know a good tool to control harddisk usage of current Windows processes? I have a large harddisk (250 GB) under Windows XP with dozens and hundreds of subdirectories. Some (probably browsing related) process fills up that partition (like 500 MB - 1 GB per evening), maybe with cache or temporary files, but i don't know where exactly. How can i find out, which process is responsible for this and where the new files are stored? I know, some tools can summarize the current size of directories, but i am more interested in their change of size over time. GermanJoe (talk) 04:29, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

There are programs, such as WinDirStat, that tell you which directories are taking up the most space. But I don't know of any programs that could be able to tell you which processes are generating the biggest files. JIP | Talk 04:35, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, I found the culprit with WinDirStat, looking at "last changed" directories. GermanJoe (talk) 06:22, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Recovery media on flash memory

I recently got my Toshiba laptop, running Win' 7, back from repair after the hard disc failed. I made a set of 4 recovery discs on DVDs, I also noted that I can do the same on flash memory. I presume an SD card or USB thumb drive would do?

Are there any pros/cons in doing this? It will require ≈12gb and I know I can, right now, get a Sandisk Cruzer Slice 16 Gb USB 2.0 flash drive for A$5. I can also get an EMTEC 32Gb drive for ≈$10$20. Perhaps then I could partition the drive or have sub directories and have another set of recovery files, after I have re-loaded all my games and MS Office, for example?

May have a compatibility problem with Sandisk though. :-\ [1]220 of ^Borg 06:20, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

It is not that simple, as you have to boot from the recovery disc. You can create a multi-boot USB; see List of tools to create Live USB systems. I used [Easy2Boot] to create a multi-boot 500G USB hard drive. From the boot menu I can select several utility discs or install various versions of Windows or Linux that are stored on the drive as ISO files. I then have other non-boot utilities such as PortableApps.com, MS Office, Libre Office and others. --  Gadget850 ^talk 18:52, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Gadget850:
Thanks for the reply. I have edited my post a little, the 32 Gb drive is $20 from Emtec, not $10. The $5/16 Gb seems a very cheap restore 'backup' for a HDD. According to this, booting from a disc isn't needed:

"requiring simply that you press F12 as the computer starts, selecting the disc or USB you stored the recovery image on."

• It seems from reading the help files that the Toshiba "Recovery Media Creator" only copies the pre-existing recovery image, it doesn't create an image of the existing HDD state, which is what I wanted to do:

"A recovery image of your computer is stored on the hard drive. You can create recovery medias from the image using TOSHIBA Recovery Media Creator."

It also says "USB flash memory", so it appears that an SD card isn't a media that can be used.

• Are there any good reasons to prefer DVD over USB Flash for this sort of application? --220 of ^Borg 05:47, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

If the SD card is formatted as a bootable device and your system recognizes it as such, then it should work, it is just not a commonly used solution. I have a workstation that boots FreeNAS on an SD card.DVD is only preferble if the system won't boot from USB, otherwise it is more fragile and slower. I work out of my car a lot, and my CD/DVD sets go though some temperature extremes so I have multiple copies. I have mainly used individual boot USBs but I am switching to an Easy2Boot hard drive but I have two for redundancy. --  Gadget850 ^talk 12:54, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Postage stamp sized dialog boxes in Windows

When a dialog box such as "Save File As" comes up, it only uses a tiny portion of the screen. This means I have to do lots of scrolling, adjustment of column locations and widths, and zooming, to be able to find and read the thing I want. The issue is that I have the screen set to a high res (at least 1600x1200), but Windows doesn't use all that space. Is there any way to convince it to use the entire screen ? (A maximize button on the dialog box, if even present, never seems to maximize the contents of the window, just the border.) I'd also like the text in the dialog box to be bigger (maybe text twice as big in a window 4x as big), but the option to set Windows text size bigger seems to cause text to no longer fit in the allocated space, rather than increasing the allocated space accordingly. StuRat (talk) 16:21, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

I think if there's any hope for an answer you'll have to specify the Windows version. I did some brief googling and found people claiming that this was not possible to directly control in windows XP or 7. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:17, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

I use Windows 98 and Windows 7. Win 7 seems to handle it a lot better. StuRat (talk) 04:02, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

This depends on the program as well as the Windows version. The standard Windows open/save dialog can be resized by dragging the edges or the handle at the lower right, and it will remember its new size. This hasn't always been true but I think it has been true since XP at least. Software that uses custom open/save dialogs won't have similar functionality unless it implements it. Win32 doesn't have a standard layout manager, so making resizable dialogs is more of a hassle than it would be in Qt or Swing for example. .NET does have layout management, though. If you're having this problem with a .NET application, it's because the programmer sucks.

Win32 dialog boxes are laid out in dialog units, which are determined by the average size of alphabetic characters in the system font. Doubling the point size of the system font should therefore double the width and height of all dialog boxes and everything in them (after logging out and back in). I have no direct experience with this, though. -- BenRG (talk) 21:57, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

"Win32" = any 32 bit Windows O/S ? How do 64 bit versions behave ? StuRat (talk) 04:02, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

Win32 means the Windows API and its widgets. Software that uses some other widget toolkit will behave differently. Even the 64-bit version is called Win32. (There are a lot of web hits for "Win64", but I think they're all mistakes. As far as I know, there is no such thing as Win64.) -- BenRG (talk) 07:53, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

I do not believe that is exactly correct. Microsoft's MSDN documentation for Win32 states: "The Win32 API defines the 32-bit members of the Windows family from the programmer's point of view." If you are writing software that should run in 64-bit mode, you need to use the Windows API (not the Win32 API). Of course, these are related, APIs with overlapped feature-sets; one is the historical antecedent; but they are documented separately. What's the difference? Well, Win32 APIs have the prefix "Win32_"; it does not include the Microsoft Foundation Class objects and APIs; it does not include the newer functions and data types; it does not include CLR or .NET. Users of MFC, .NET, or newer versions of "The Windows API" never write at such low levels, so they let a wrapper-API decide what to actually execute. Nowadays, (i.e. for the last 15 years), it's a fairly sure bet that code you write to the Windows API does not call into the Win32 implementation, unless you're running specifically 32-bit versions of Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows ME, even if you're on a 32-bit machine. (For example: Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP all have 32-bit versions that are unlikely to use Win32 libraries and run-times by default). So to summarize: not all 32-bit Windows libraries are "Win32"; not all Windows libraries are "Win32". Win32 is a specific set of functions and data structures, all of which are very old and 100% deprecated, replaced by The Windows API.

In Windows, a Dialog Box is a specific type of data structure, corresponding to a specific on-screen representation: specifically, it is an instance of a WNDCLASS struct which uses the DefDlgProc procedure. Its size on screen can be carefully controlled by the programmer, or its size and location settings may be left to the user-interface defaults.

BenRG correctly points out that system font can affect the dialog box size; but the exact relationship between system-font, dialog-box font, and dialog box dimensions, can always be overridden by any application programmer. Nimur (talk) 18:51, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

"Windows API" may be a broader term than Win32 these days. I was in any case talking about Win32. MFC and .NET call Win32 functions all the time; the whole windowing system is part of Win32. What you said is analogous to suggesting that Gnome and KDE applications don't use X. -- BenRG (talk) 20:05, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

...nowadays, most Linux systems that use Gnome and KDE do not use X11. They use Wayland, which is a total reimplementation of the display stack on Linux-like systems. If you follow Ubuntu, you'll notice that they're converting to another alternative, called Mir.

If you would like to read about motivation for the replacement, here is the main Wayland FAQ; here is the KDE Developer Blog on Wayland; and here is the Gnome/GTK+ Project's developer information: the main source code branch for both systems is now Wayland-based.

It is strikingly analogous how all of these windowing systems have migrated to a totally new implementation. If you've been paying a lot of attention to the evolution of graphics hardware, you might get an idea why: as graphics accelerators have matured, a more common subset of features (like window compositing) can be pushed into the hardware acceleration layers. Older software architectures did not make that very easy. Nimur (talk) 21:56, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, I guess I'm behind the times then re X, but MFC and .NET do run on top of Win32. -- BenRG (talk) 05:35, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Font problems in FireFox

FireFox seems to have changed its font settings without asking me. Text boxes (such as this text-mode edit box I'm now writing in) now appear in proportional font. I don't like this one bit. I thought FireFox had simply changed the default monospace font to a proportional one, but no, it's still "Monospace". FireFox apparently thinks people want to write in text boxes in proportional font, so it ignores the monospace font, whatever is selected. I got around this by checking "Allow websites to choose their own fonts" but I'd rather use fonts of my own choosing. How can I do this? JIP | Talk 17:36, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm using Firefox 32.0.3, and I can re-create the problem: If I uncheck "Allow pages to choose their own fonts", a Wikipedia edit box uses the "Default font" I selected in the Options of Firefox. It looks like this is a bug in Firefox. For now, I was able to work around the problem by using the following steps.

1. In the Help menu, go to Troubleshooting Information.
2. Find the line for Profile Folder and click Show Folder.
3. Open the chrome folder.
4. Create or edit the file userContent.css so it contains the line
   textarea { font-family: monospace !important; }
5. Restart Firefox.

Here's a post on the Firefox Support Forum: Plain text files are rendered in proportional font. How can I change this? In this post dated Sept 10, 2014, the original poster describes text they expect to be monospaced now appears proportional. They don't say if they have unchecked "Allow pages to choose their own fonts." A responder mentions editing userContent.css to work around the problem. The original poster confirms that worked, but suspects there's still an underlying bug. That original poster filed Bug 1065986. It was marked as a duplicate of Bug 1065016. That in turn was marked as a duplicate of Bug 1022481, which closely matches your problem in SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, but evidently the bug affected other products. It says it's been fixed, so I don't know if the problem has returned or if the fix isn't yet reflected in the public releases of Firefox.

Here's some diagnosis that may help someone eventually fix the bug. With "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" unchecked, I went to a Wikipedia edit box, right clicked on it, and chose Inspect Element. In the developer tools that appear, I went to the right margin, clicked on Computed, then found the line for font-family. When the triangle is closed, the definition appears blank, which seems odd, because every other item has some value listed. If I expand the triangle, I see Firefox is (supposed to be?) using a font-family called -moz-fixed from a definition in forms.css, a part of Firefox's built-in definitions. I'm not sure exactly what -moz-fixed is, but it sounds like it's supposed to be a fixed-width font, but for some reason it ends up using the "Default font" instead.

--Bavi H (talk) 02:10, 26 September 2014 (UTC)