After my last post about missing disk space, I thought everything had been fixed… only to watch it quickly creep back up to nearly full.One solution I discovered today was to restrict the amount of space reserved for system restore - open up a DOS (command) prompt with administrator privileges (normally you’d right-click on the shortcut and choose “Run as administrator”) - and then type the following command:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=5GB

where /On=C: and /For=C: represent the drive where the files are stored, and for which drive - if you have only one hard disk, both will be C: - but if you have more than one drive, change /On to one of the other drives for better performance and security. /Maxsize=5GB is the amount of space you want to allocate - in this case 5 gigabytes. Read the rest of this entry »

For some time now, I’ve noticed that my notebook always seems to be quite full - I regularly move data onto an external hard drive, uninstall programs that I don’t use, and yet I always seem to have less than 5% disk space left.

What was most unusual was that every time I went through my cleaning routine, I would go to check my disk space - and the amount available didn’t increase, it decreased! Read the rest of this entry »

Strange as it seems - Windows Vista was absolutely terrible when it was first released, in my case my notebook seemed 100x slower than it would’ve been with XP installed - the hard disk was always thrashing, while just about any software seemed to hang forever.  I lost count of how many times I thought about throwing this notebook through the window…

Fortunately for some of us, a few leaked beta copies of Vista SP1 found their way onto the Internet, and one of these made my computer tolerable, at least until now.  Yesterday you read a bit about the hassles I encountered when installing SP1, but you’ll be glad to know that once I removed the Nokia drivers, things went smooth as silk.

So today is a special day of sorts - next year I’ll be able to proudly mark March 21st as the day my notebook began to act like a notebook should.

But did it make things better for casino software? Read the rest of this entry »

Mickey.. er.. MicroSoft hasn’t changed its ways one bit.  Despite providing us with Windows, and giving us Word, Excel, IE, and a ton of other stuff - it still hasn’t learned to be friendly to anyone but their own geeks and nerds.

I’m sure all of you have experienced the frustration of the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), or else some error which keeps one of your programs from working properly - and all you get is a cryptic error message like “Error 0×80073712 - Get Help”.

Read the rest of this entry »

After a day of messing around with some new scripts for a different project, I decided to take a look at the jackpot database to see how busy the jackpots were - and did a double-take.  Note the time of this post, however, as numbers do fluctuate according to time and markets.

The most interesting piece of data I came across was that, at this particular moment, Playtech’s jackpots have an increase rate which is more than all other jackpots combined - needless to say “all other” includes Microgaming and Cryptologic and all the other major software manufacturers. Read the rest of this entry »