Savihost

[aMUSEd]

Just testing this out as Minihost isn't working for me anymore. I was interested in this on the site:

Note: in Windows XP, you can use the command
fsutil hardlink create newname.exe existing.exe
to save space on your NTFS-formatted hard disk.

What does it mean exactly? - does it mean if I had several VSTi's instead of putting a copy of Savihost in each one's folder and renaming each I could just have one copy of Savihost and link it to multiple VSTi's? Is that how it saves space?? And how do you do this command thing anyway?

[arakula]

Just testing this out as Minihost isn't working for me anymore. I was interested in this on the site:

Note: in Windows XP, you can use the command
fsutil hardlink create newname.exe existing.exe
to save space on your NTFS-formatted hard disk.

What does it mean exactly? - does it mean if I had several VSTi's instead of putting a copy of Savihost in each one's folder and renaming each I could just have one copy of Savihost and link it to multiple VSTi's? Is that how it saves space?? And how do you do this command thing anyway?

That means that when you got an NTFS-formatted hard disk (as opposed to FAT32), XP offers the possibility to create so-called hard links. If you're unfamiliar to Unix, this might not seem as intuitive as it looks to me - the "link" concept has been in there for ages.

In a typical Unix system, there are two kinds of links: hard links and symbolic links. A symbolic link is, very loosely put, a directory entry that says "If you use me, the real file or directory name to use is /bla/bla/bla/name", which can even reside on another filesystem. Symbolic links can even point to non-existent files or directories.

A hard link, in contrast, points to the very same file as the original and has to reside on the same filesystem. The system keeps track of the number of links in the file itself and thus assures that the file is only deleted when the last link is deleted and such things.

NTFS provides hard link capabilities.

A link saves a lot of space, since it only needs to store the number of referring directory entries (that's an educated guess, not knowing the internal NTFS structures - it might of course be more, such as an actual reference to the directory entries themselves, but I doubt it). In case of SAVIHost, a link saves you about 270KB; if you do it for MiniHost, it's roughly 1MB you save for each link.

Regarding "How do you do this command thing anyway?", I'd strongly suggest that you use your mouse arm and open the "Programs / Accessories" menu from the task bar - you'll find something most likely called "Command Line" or so (got a German version here). Click on that. And that's the last click you'll do, for the rest, you'll need that thing with the 101-or-more keys that most likely is attached to the computer. Sorry, I just couldn't resist... sarcasm put aside, this needs to be done from a command line; there's no way to accomplish it through the GUI.

All clear now?

Bye,

Hermann

P.S.: Sorry for not replying earlier, but I don't spend my days watching this forum... just did a leisurely browse for SAVIHost and found this thread