How to gain 100-350MB more free space upon Windows installation

When installing Windows Vista or 7 on a new hard drive, the OS creates a 100MB partition right at the beginning of the drive. If you are installing Windows 8, then the size of that partition is 350MB. I have Acer Aspire One ZG5 with 8GB SSD, which is very small and I have to make custom Windows installation, that use less space. Nevertheless, every MB counts! So if you are like me or you just hate that small partition that the OS creates, let me show you how to trick the setup not to create it. It's really simple - create partitions manually, not through the installer. Here's how:

1. Boot your installation.
2. When the setup wants you to choose partition to install Windows to, hit Shift + F10. This should bring command prompt to you.
3. Type diskpart and press Enter. Diskpart is an utility coming with Windows, so you really shouldn't do anything special to get it. In case you make your own installation, make sure you leave diskpart utility on the setup disk.
4. Type list disk and remember the number of the disk you want to partition. In my case it's 0, so replace 0 with your number from now on.
5. Type select disk 0.
6. Type clean (this will erase all the info on the drive, if any).
7. Now if you want the whole drive to be one partition (as in my case), type create partition primary. If you want to have more partitions, type create partition primary size=n where n is the size of the partition you want in MB. The rest of the partitions you can create again here, or later with the GUI.
8. Type select partition 1.
9. Type format fs=ntfs quick.
10. Probably not needed, but just to be sure type active.
11. Type exit, to exit Diskpart and then exit again, to exit cmd.
12. From the setup choose the partition you've just created and proceed with the install without loosing 100/350MB :)

Minimizing Dropbox usage thus maximizing free space

I bet you already know about Dropbox and currently you are searching of a way to increase the available free space. I'm already at the maximum available space - 25.8GB. I've done Getting Started, Sharing staff, DropQuest 1 and 2 and beta photo upload (dough last 500MB never got to me). Referrals are also to the maximum. So right now I'm stuck with ~26GB till Dropbox releases another option for gaining free space :( Then I thought what if I shrink the size of my files instead of increasing my free space? It's a good idea, but I needed a way to make it without archives, as I wanted to be able to open the files with a double click. To answer this I first needed to analyze what type of files do I have and how often I use them. Here is my report:

Music files - MP3 mostly. Everyday use.
Video files - VOB, MOV, AVI, MKV and MP4. Using them from time to time.
Pictures - JPG mostly. Using them from time to time.
Text files - PDF, MHT (HTML site in one file), TXT. Most of the files are used once per year at best.
Programs - lots of EXE and DLL executable files. Using them on daily basis.

After the analysis I found out there is a way to compress 99% of my files and still be able to open them by just double clicking! Of course to do that I needed to change some formats, loose some (unnoticeable) quality and loose a lot of time (most of the time was for research, so you won't lose it as I'm giving you all info in one place), but it was totally worth it! I was able to shrink all my files and add a lot more and still have almost half of my Dropbox free! In numbers, I was able to compress ~35GB to ~15GB!!! That's 20GB saved! And I still have 10GB of free space with all my music and pictures being in a save place :) So, how I did it? Let's get down to the details:

Music files

MP3 is an old format and as such it's not the best. There are other formats which can provide better quality on the same bitrate. Also it's proven that 128 kbps MP3 is enough for most people. Only trained ear can make difference between 128 kbps and 320 kbps MP3. So compressing your MP3 files to 128 kbps will save you a lot disk space (saved me 7GB), but you'll loose some quality (not that you'll notice it). To minimize quality loss, use another file format, newer that MP3! There are OGG, WMA, AC3 and others. I personally used OGG, but WMA is better integrated (almost all MP3 players read it) - you decide. To encode my files into the new format I used MediaCoder with the following settings:

Video files

VOB files are VERY large files! They are one of the main reasons I got 20GB saved :D Other files are small, but not as small as I wanted to! So I searched Internet about the best new (newer almost always is better) codec that have support in players too. I ended up with Google's WebM. It was able to compress 250MB VOB into 32MB WEBM file! Of course there is slight (unnoticeable) quality loss, but when you watch this video say 10-15 years from now, the quality then will be much better and this VOB's quality will look awful with or without this small quality loss. The memories this video brings you are important, not the video quality itself ;) Other files are already compressed, so WEBP was able to slice the size in two without any quality loss! So how do I encode to WebM? Well, the best way I found is using an Add-on for Mozilla Firefox (I'm a Chrome fan, but sometimes Firefox beats the crap out of Chrome) called Firefogg.

Pictures

It turns out WebM has a sister project called WebP for pictures instead of movies :) So I used it. It was able to smack 5MB JPG into 1MB WEBP without any loss! For already compressed JPEGs with size of 1-1.5MB, WebP was able to deliver files with sizes between 100-150KB! Also WebP supports lossless compression with alpha channel, so you can smack your PNG files too :) GIF files are in the works ;) For more on how to compress your images using WebP see my earlier blog post.

Text files

Here I did a bit of cheating - I uploaded as much as I could in Google Docs and compressed text files which I do not use often (for an example my old HTML projects). All the text files were less than 100MB, so not much cheating. But there are some files left, too big to be uploaded to Google Docs. 55MB PDF file! Google Docs allows only 2MB file to be uploaded :( Almost all of my PDF files were larger. Not to mention MHT files. So what I did is I compressed those PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Pro using this tutorial. This sliced 20MB off of this large PDF! And the end result is again PDF! So it just compresses the PDF. The down side is reduced compatibility - older PDF readers won't be able to read it. Who cares - Chrome reads it :D What about MHTs? Well here I had to make a couple of conversions to be able to convert MHT to PDF and then compress it using Acrobat Pro. Chrome cannot open MHT files, but can print everything to PDF file. So I needed this MHT opened in Chrome no matter what! Well, the solution is simple - open it with IE and save it as complete web page. Then open this HTML file with Chrome and print it as PDF. After that crush it with Acrobat Pro and you should have smaller PDF than the MHT. If you are advanced web user like me, you can even open object inspector and remove useless stuff from the web page before printing - this will further reduce the size of the PDF ;) In the end, after the compression, I uploaded again to Google Docs files with sizes smaller than 2MB. End result - 50% less space for text files :)

Programs

This actually is quite simple - use PortableApps.com AppCompactor to compress all of your programs. Backup all programs before use. Set to best compression first. Compress them one by one and test them after compression. If the program doesn't run, copy over the backup and try again with other compression algorithm. In my case all compressed perfectly with the best compression :)

Conclusion

All file types can be opened with popular software. OGG is supported by all popular players, WebM is also supported by them and browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Opera. WebP can be opened with some picture viewers like Picasa and IrfanView and can be opened with the default Windows Photo Viewer by installing a codec supplied by Google. PDFs can be opened with latest version of your PDF reader or by Chrome. So all in all this is a win-win situation - you get more space and you are still able to use your files as before :)

How to get the best interest, quality and save time at the same time?

Are you trying to save some money by depositing in savings account? If so, good! Putting spare money in deposit is good way to fight inflation and even make some money. Currently, the inflation in Bulgaria is 4-5%, where deposit interests are 5-7% depending on the bank, so deposits are the best safe way to save money. Or are they? What if I tell you there is MUCH better way to save small amounts of money? Yes there is - it's food. That's right food can give you way better interest that every bank. How you may ask? It's actually really simple - with the whole global economics problems the prices of daily groceries rise constantly. If you buy something today, in 2-3 months it's price will be higher and usually it'll be more than the 7% your bank is giving you! For an example, 3 months ago a jar of beans cost 2.79 BGN (1.43 EUR) where now it costs 2.99 BGN (1.53 EUR) which is just above 7% rise. Another example is a bottle of spaghetti sauce - 3 months before was 1.59 BGN (0.81 EUR), now it's 1.99 BGN (1.02 EUR) or a massive 25% increase! Also, for the latest example, the quality of the sauce is now worse than before! So if you bought it before, not only you saved 25% + inflation, but you got a better quality too! Of course you have to buy a lot of bottles to really worth it. Here it comes the time saving too - buy bulk! Buy packages of 10 or 20, but first check the expiration date of course (most products have 1-2 years). That way you'll go only 1 time (loose time for one purchase), but you'll buy as for 10 times :) Time is money ;) Ok, some calculations:
Let's say you buy 20 jars of beans:
20 x 2.79 = 55.8 (before)
20 x 2.99 = 59.8 (now)
This is 7% saved in just 3 months or 2 "free" jars of beans! Considering you eat from those jars and the price rises again through the year, we can estimate around 10-14% APY! Not bad :)
Let's say you buy 20 bottles of spaghetti sauce:
20 x 1.59 = 31.8
20 x 1.99 = 39.8
Again, here we got 4 "free" bottles and an estimation of 50% APY!!! Get that! Not to mention the quality and time.
Now, here it comes the fun part - promotions! It's another way to save even more money and combined with bulk buying it saves A LOT! Yesterday I saw those jars of beans discounted to 2.19 from 2.99! That's 36%!!! Let's do the calculation again:
20 x 2.19 = 43.8
20 x 2.99 = 59.8
That are more that 5 "free" jars! Estimation of more that 50% APY if you buy only when a promotion is active! And there always will be a promotion when buying bulk - don't start searching for a promotion when you run out of food! When your reserve is less than 40% it's good to start looking for promotions to refill it ;) Also promotions can be used to save money and time even when the prices are not going up constantly. Right now there is a promotion for my favorite rice - 1.99 BGN (1.02 EUR) for 1 kg package, where it's normal price is (for a loooong time) 2.45 BGN (1.25 EUR). Calculation:
20 x 1.99 = 39.8
20 x 2.45 = 49.0
Around 4 "free" packages of rice or estimated 15% APY!
Only one golden rule when buying bulk - buy one to test it before buying a lot, because the quality may got worse and you'll end up with a lot low quality food!
In the end, you can get over 20% APY when combining different foods. Let's say you gave 1000 BGN (511 EUR) for bulk buying this year at 20% APY average:
1000 x 20% = 200 BGN saved through food for 1 year
1000 x 7% = 70 BGN max saved through deposit for 1 year
As you can see you can easily get over 3 times better interest from food than from your bank. The more food you buy, the more savings you have :) It's up to how much you eat and how many people are there in your house. Of course bank deposits will still remain the best safe way to save money, as you can't spend 100 000 for food, but you can put them in deposit. So next time you see a promotion of a food you regularly eat, don't hesitate - buy! If you don't have the money - find it and buy! Presuming you have a deposit account, you'll be able to repay the debt when next salary comes, so get money and buy the food, as it'll give you better interest than your bank will!

Save precious pixels by using thin scrollbars

Hi all. Recently I bought second hand Acer Aspire One AOA110 ZG5 and found 1024x600 pretty inconvenient for browsing. Then I found Thin Scroll Bar extension for Google Chrome. I know it's not much, just a couple of pixels, but still it's good. So if you are a Chrome user, give it a shot. Hope you like it.

PS: It also makes tiny scrollbars to all dropdowns.