Sometimes it just happens: Partition layouts break due to user mistakes or software/operating system errors. You’re quite lucky if your partition table just gets a tabula rasa because this means you can still recover most of your old files and directories, even their names could still be intact. A great tool to do that is Partition Find and Mount. Find and Mount is free for personal use but has a few limitations: You can only access one file at the time and the throughput is limited to 500KB/s which is still plenty if you’re just curious whether you could restore file XYZ.
There’s also a professional version that doesn’t have any throughput limitations but also only accesses one file at the time.
One thing I really like about this software is it’s ease of use. You just specify the disk, run a more-or-less quick scan (there are several levels available) and bam, you’re able to mount the partition and browse through your files (or what’s left of them). It’s so dead simple, you can hardly go wrong.
Other products like Active@ Partition Recovery aren’t bad but way slower and harder to use — at least in my simple case.
Modern HD content devours a plethora of performance. My CPU spikes at 100% whenever I watch 1080p content, leading to framedrops and stuttering audio on my Linux machine. I never really understood exactly why the same video would work on my much weaker notebook. Now the times of suffering are over, enter VDPAU.
VDPAU is nVidia’s answer to AMD’s XvBA, both representing APIs to succeed the XvMC fame of decoding video material directly on the GPU – but this time not limited to MPEG2.
For this very reason I had to switch my graphic cards. I previously used a EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS/640, one of the older models of the series. Now I’m flying on a brand new EVGA GeForce 9800 GT which is basically the very same card but with a newer chip.
The performance gain is tremendous, the CPU usage fell from 100% to 1.9%!
You can force mplayer to prefer vdpau’d codecs by adding the following lines to your ~/.mplayer/config:
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