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In Reply to: Some additional suggestions posted by Christine Tham on April 6, 2007 at 01:50:41:
>For example, you can build a totally fanless PC (no fan in power supply, passive cooling etc.) and solid state hard disk (eg. high capacity compact flash or similar). The actual music files can be stored elsewhere (ie. on a server or NAS).Careful when using flash disks, depending on your OS and configuration you can kill a flash drive very quickly, as it's only good for a few hundred thousand writes before it fails. This is fine for music files and pictures, not so much for OS temp files, the registry, the MFT, or swap.
Linux has no problems with a read-only boot drive, and even has special filesystems available that reduce the likelyhood of killing writable, bootable flash devices. Windows tends to hate it. There's a utility called BartPE that lets you build bootable windows CD's, you could probably use it to build a read-only filesystem that could boot from flash.
If you are going for a fanless solution, check out the new low powered processors from Intel and AMD. They vary their clock speed depending on load, so they only use as much current as needed to perform a given task. These are probably well suited to using a fanless heatsink solution.
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More options herehttp://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html
I will wait for thishttp://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=23425
It's a driver originally written for Windows XP Embedded, but you can make it work with normal Windows XP. It "protects" your flash drive by making it "read only" - all writes are buffered to memory, and then discarded when you shut the PC down.As a bonus (because the flash drive never gets written to) you never need to defragment it, and it's also protected from viruses :-)
There's been a lot of discussion on optimizing Windoze in the forums at MP3car.com They're not concerned with ultimate audio fidelity so much as quick booting, but I have seen ASIO mentioned, and there've been discussions on running from flash memory.
Hi Christine,How would a mere mortal do this.
I have shared your prior posts on EWF with any "computer geek" I could from professional IT people to my "I'm a PC builder/gamer" friends.
No one seems to get this.
None of them have heard about the write limitations of flash drives, don't seem to believe me when I mention such limitations, and don't seem to be able to work with EWF.
This link below, which I found via searching, may be useful.
Be careful about replacing Winlogon with Minlogon if you intend to use the PC in a networked environment. My advice is don't do it unless you absolutely know what you are doing and understand the consequences.And an easy way to avoid Windows File Protection errors if you do want to use Minlogon is to replace not just the copy in the windows directory but also the "safe" copy (best to search for all occurences and replace all of them). You need to do this after booting Windows in "Safe" mode.
Finally - a warning when using the hibernate once reboot many feature. Many pro audio soundcard drivers (unfortunately, including mine) don't support hibernation.
You should be able to get EWF working reasonably easily. If in doubt, try to get it working on a normal (non flash) hard drive first. Once you are confident (and you can turn writebacks on and off with no problems), then follow the instructions to create a bootable flash drive.
I use a 4GB compact flash card with a flash to IDE bridge, so I don't have to do anything special (most flash readers mark the media as "removable" which creates issues with installing XP - there are various ways of getting around this - easiest is to install on a normal hard disk, then image copy to a "removable" flash drive).
Good luck! The reward is you may find that your system sounds much better when you take out the hard disk. Mine sounded noticeably "cleaner" and more "dynamic" (previously I was using a laptop hard disk).
Thanks for the added info C,I am already a bit confused.
THe nice link refers to a trial version, but it is only good for 120 days. Is it good enough to just use it once, or do I need to buy something?
... however, all you need is the EWF driver (I think it's on 3 files which you need to extract).The driver itself, once you install on normal Windows XP, does not carry any time limitation.
Let me know via email if you get really stuck trying to extract the files, I can probably help you out there.
THat is such a nice offer, one I hope I don't need to take you up on :).
THANKS.When I did use google, it only took me to Microsoft sites, and they were useless.
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