RAR File Format

[Arkcon]

Suicide Junkie said:

3) WinRar saves you 20% on the imagemod. 30% on Gritecon.
For my Starfury P&N-ism mod, WinRAR compresses ALL THREE campaigns smaller than zip can compress one campaign.

For anybody on Dialup, it is well worth the download."


Well, If that's true then, I stand corrected. RAR is a superior format, and is pretty popular as well. Well worth it for anyone to add to their toolchest.

[Instar]

Suicide Junkie said:

2) XP is icky
Upgrade to 98.

Boooo!

[Arkcon]

Suicide Junkie said:
2) XP is icky
Upgrade to 98.

Now this is a bit of a threadjack on my part here, but its already happened twice, so no harm in it happening again.

Many people have panned WinXP, and I dunno, I kinda liked it. But it has some seriously bloated code, and some of Microsoft's improvements are just security holes. (have you heard the latest one over at /. )

I went from Win95 that came with my Pentium III, to Win98, to WinXp. I skipped Windows 2000 because many people had problems when it came out. Now I hear (from some dubious sources) that its the same as XP, just without the bloated desktop. Anyone like Win 2000 enough to comment?

I'm jonesing bigtime for my graphical games. Even more than Diablo II, I miss playing Malfador's Starfury. All this talk about SE5 makes me seriously want to blow up some pirate spacecraft. So I may switch back to Windows ... for a little while.

[Fyron]

Win2k is nowhere near XP in terms of bloat... There was a ton of garbage piled on top of Win2k to make WinXP, with very little in the way of actual improvement of the OS. The only way you could praise XP is if you skipped Win2k, really... Win2k will probably be the Last "decent" OS from Microsoft. It is all downhill from here (not that it was ever at any particularly high point). The only games I have ever had any trouble running in Win2k are old DOS games that require "features" (read: bugs) of Win9x that are not present in the WinNT line. A partition of a few hundred megabytes with Win98 on it works well for such games.

[Rasorow]

My system always runs better with the Win2k image then the XP image. If you have some knowledge of 2k its easy to lock and strip stupid stuff. XP is just a nightmare and I hate the fact that I have a hassle with XP evertime I do a system upgrade. Its stupid for someone like me who constantly builds and upgrades their system to have to mess with that. In addition my system runs slower with XP then 2k and my emulators dont work as well.

Rasorow

(Why then do I run XP currently? because I have some programs I spent ALOT of time to trick into running on XP that will not run in Win2k..... due to those Win9x "bugs")

(note statement about running slower is based off the presence of performance issues in games on WinXP that do not exist in Win2k. statement about emulators is related to emulators that work in 2k not working in XP or ROMs for emulators that work in 2k not working in XP)

[Aiken]

I use w2k too. Compared to XP it's a clean and simple OS. And it's much more controllable that XP. It almost free of crappy 16bit legacy of 9x line (unlike XP, which include legacy code for better compatibility). And it definetely will be my Last MS OS, because there's no 64bit XP yet (and it's rumored that MS decided to skip this edition for the sake of Longhorn).

[Suicide Junkie]

Rasorow said:
(Why then do I run XP currently? because I have some programs I spent ALOT of time to trick into running on XP that will not run in Win2k..... due to those Win9x "bugs")

2k isn't a 9x... its one of the NTs

[Fyron]

Arkcon said:
If you just want to keep files together, just right click, zip, and be done with it. I guess. Is maximum technology really needed for SE4 mods and Image packs?

FQM lost a good 4-5 MBs of file size when I converted it to RAR instead of WinRar-made ZIPs. Adamant lost a bit more. Please tell me that the bandwidth savings of this, plus the image mod files all in RAR, over hundreds of downloads per month, are not worth it for a web host such as myself.

Plus everything SuicideJunkie said.

Note that there are newer formats out there that give marginally better compression than RAR format. They are just rather obtuse...

I'd prefer not to get a self-extracting exe, I do worry about how insecure it might be.

You can always right click on the file and select "Open With Winrar" to bypass the EXE nature of the file. These sorts of security concerns are part of what prompted the poll in the firt place.

[PvK]

What's the best free RAR extractor?

PvK

[Fyron]

7-zip is GNU/GPL, so quite free.