Survivor Ultimate Survivor (2004).rar Checkedl
Sibyl Piccuillo
A massive demonic invasion has overwhelmed the Union Aerospace Corporation's Mars Research Facility, leaving only chaos and horror in its wake. As one of only a few survivors, you must fight your way to hell and back against a horde of evil monsters.
Your comment action was successful. When a comment is deleted all replies to the comment will be removed as well. Because you are an admin, you can click the \"view deleted\" link above to view deleted comments in-case you wish to undelete them in the future. If this was a mistake, click the link again to reverse the change.
This is the latest in a series of posts on using Blu-ray BD-R optical discs as a form of backup. This one is brief because, before I could even finish it, I was already starting to explore a different technology that threatened to supersede the one discussed here.
I was interested in using write-once optical discs as a form of backup because they seemed to be relatively immune to ransomware. As discussed in a separate post on a ransomware-resistant backup plan, files saved on optical discs appeared invulnerable to file-encrypting ransomware.
The purpose here was just to save data until a newer backup replaced them. On that level, I had done OK so far with cheap PlexDisc media: I had found that a backup set created five years earlier was still readable with no problems. Within the five- to ten-year future, one could hope that faster BD-R drives and discs, or some entirely different read-only technology, would justify an upgrade. The very slow pace of BD-R writing and reading would encourage a swift switch to that new technology.
The question at hand was whether I wanted to change that last step. It treated each BD-R disc as an independent entity. That was good in some ways: failure of one disc in a backup set would have no effect on the others; I could use WinRAR or 7-zip to produce higher compression than I would get with most backup tools; with a file list, I could home in on the disc containing the file I wanted, if I did have some reason to retrieve something from the BD-R backup.
But as I had discovered, those positives tended to be superseded by the negatives. The chief negative was time: the approach just described was very time-consuming. It took time to assemble the files that way, and restoring could be very time-intensive. Restoring required me to copy the VeraCrypt container back to a hard or solid state disk drive (HDD/SDD), mount that container, copy its contents out onto the drive, and then rearrange those contents back into their original folder structure. (Attempting to mount the VeraCrypt container directly from the BD-R seemed to entail a lot of wear and tear on the Blu-ray drive.)
It would be far faster to use backup software that was capable of splitting the entire backup into pieces, each of which was big enough to fill a BD-R. It would be especially helpful if that software included a file-finding feature, such that I could tell it what file I was looking for, and it would steer me directly to disc 23, where it had stored that file.
The Background section explains that I saw a type 1 hypervisor as a potential help in reducing my dependence on Windows 10. For one thing, if I ran Win10 in a VM, other functions could carry on even if Win10 crashed, was targeted by malware, or had to reboot to install updates. If I could run other VMs independently of Win10, I could perhaps assign some functions to Win7 or even WinXP VMs that would keep running their assigned tasks; I could perhaps improve browsing security by doing my browsing in an Ubuntu VM. The Win10 VM might still be a primary workspace, but I could continue to get work done in other spaces when Win10 was unavailable or uncooperative.
Then it develops that tower case servers are scarce and pricey. I will probably have to buy a rackmount server. These tend to be hot, loud, and power-hungry. For that, fixes and workarounds seem limited and iffy. Therefore, the server will probably have to be installed in another room; I will probably have to run cables to it, and access it from a client computer. We are moving away from the relatively compact concept of a single desktop running VMs. In this plan, my expense, time investment, and piles of hardware expand.
This behavior, in Adobe Premiere Elements, reminded me that Microsoft was notorious for artificial instability. I had previously noticed this sort of thing when Microsoft wanted people to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10: suddenly, Win7 systems that had been working pretty well began to have problems that resisted solution. I wondered whether Adobe was playing the same trick. It did appear, back in February 2020, that Adobe might have injected difficulties, timed to occur just after the end of the primary migration from Win7 to Win10. At that point, most users were unlikely to revert to Win7 just to keep running APE 12 and other old versions. To experience the same thing again in autumn 2021, when Windows 11 arrived, was not proof that Adobe was deliberately sabotaging users. But it could reasonably raise the question.
I could run that stuff in a Win10 VM running on the Win10 host, but that would lead to another problem: type 2 hypervisors (e.g., VirtualBox; VMware Workstation Player), running on a full host like Windows 10, were not strong on performance. They functioned more or less as programs running within Windows. As such, they had to compete for system resources with the big spreadsheets, video editing, or whatever else I might be running on the host. I got terrible performance when I tried running APE in a VM in a type 2 hypervisor on Win10.
My plan, then, was to find a Type 1 hypervisor that I could run on my desktop computer, and that would be capable of playing host to the various VMs I had in mind. In that case, a virtualized version of my Windows 10 desktop installation would be just one of my running VMs.
My search for a Type 1 hypervisor led to numerous comments about a handful of leading contenders. This section reviews some of those comments. Not all commenters agreed with one another but, collectively, they did contribute to my sense of what the leading contenders were like.
I use esxi and hyperv because that is what 99% of my customers use so it just makes sense for me to keep up using it for job familiarity. Also searching online for fixes when using obscure software is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So many people use esxi and hyperv that its easy to ask google for just about anything and find a dozen forum posts where people ran into the same problem or question and already found an answer.
My opinion on ESXI is that it works well but its totally rubbish if your comparing the free options and you find yourself constantly fighting purple screens. all the alternatives seem to have none of these issues. I dont know why companies/homelabbers seem to choose ESXI first over the clearly better competitors
I quote extensively from that Reddit thread because, even in my revised search results, I did not find many good articles on end-user desktop use of type 1 hypervisors. This was understandable: they were mostly used for servers. On that level, Open Homelab Project (n.d.) said,
VMware vSphere ESXi: Welcome to the joy that comes from hand-crafting your own ESXi ISOs to include that motherboard SATA controller that VMware refused to put on their [Hardware Compatibility List], loading your new ESXi with tons of VMs, running it for ages and then upgrading it forgetting about the driver and losing access to everything.
A Spiceworks thread offered the results of a poll, in response to the question, for a home lab, what free to freemium hypervisor would you recommend, that can also be used in a production environment?
Medium to large enterprises may want to consider VMware over KVM for its scalability and support. As these companies grow in scope and complexity, the support and technical capabilities of VMware will only serve them better.
Between forced reboots from Windows Update, voluntary restarts to complete software installs, and the occasional OS crash, I had [to go through the time-consuming process of restarting] my entire suite of development VMs three to five times per month.
As the foregoing remarks suggest, there were potential drawbacks even in the free version of ESXi. But for my purposes, those seemed manageable. For instance, I was surprised at the source that said ESXi imposed a steep learning curve. I suspected they were referring to its use in a full-blown enterprise environment, with all relevant VMware products in play. It was not ideal that VMware might run only VMware VMs (i.e., VMDK, not e.g., VDI or VHD), but it was not hard to convert those formats.
Well. I may not have been good at persevering, when confronted with some abstruse software like KVM or Promox. But when it came to screwing around with inappropriate hardware, I was the very model of persistence, at least to the extent my budget allowed. We are alluding to the fact that I proceeded to test that ESXi USB drive with a much newer (2017) Acer Aspire A515 laptop with 20GB RAM. That one progressed to what seemed to be a semi-final state of bootup before expiring with this:
Could I find a CPU, compatible with my ASUS H97-Plus motherboard, that would be listed in the HCL? Intel said that my Core i7-4790 CPU used the FCLGA1150 (a/k/a LGA1150) socket. CPU-World provided a list of CPUs compatible with that socket. More precisely, I found lists of CPUs compatible with my specific motherboard at Pangoly, CPU-Upgrade, and PCPartPicker. Those lists identified several types of CPU that were apparently compatible with my motherboard: Celeron, Core, Pentium, and Xeon.
My previous exploration of VMs had shown me that a VM oriented toward browsing, in particular, could be a real RAM hog. With or without a hypervisor, I was finding that 24GB was insufficient. For his server handling multiple development VMs, Lynch (2020) went from 32GB to 64GB, and then wound up doubling that to 128GB. Similarly, for a home lab server running a full suite of VMware tools, Mancini (2021) opted for 128GB. (See e.g., the Cloud Ninjas video discussing RAM in the Dell R430 server discussed below.)
7fc3f7cf58