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by Nirupam Biswas

Your pen drive bigger than 4GB?

Do you know that pen drives are formatted in FAT32? Do you know that maximum file size supported by FAT32 is 4GB? Did you ever try to copy files bigger than 4GB in your pen drive, only to be confronted by some error?

Today we have pen drives of 8GB, 32GB and more capacity ones are coming. It is natural that we try to copy files which are bigger than 4GB into them. Unfortunately FAT32 does not support single files bigger than 4GB. You need to format your pen drive in NTFS for that.

In Windows (XP) when you try to format the pen drive you are provided with FAT32 as the only option. This is probably because of portable nature of pen drives. In NTFS you can set permissions and encrypt files too. These files then may not open on other computers. Furthermore, NTFS needs more writing than FAT32. This is maybe because of the small cluster size of NTFS.

To be able to format pen drives in NTFS you will need to enable “Optimize for Performance” mode. Ples follow through the steps of this excellent article – http://blog.eches.net/tips/how-to-format-usb-drive-with-ntfs/. Ubuntu users should know that this OS already runs in optimized for performance mode.

by Nirupam Biswas

How to drive and some more on NFS.

If my friends see me giving advice on playing games then may laugh off their beds. Actually I am not much of a gamer, but I do love racing games. NFS is the best, but the recent Most Wanted Black Edition was verrrrrry tough to play. One or two bangs here and there and bye-bye to being a winner. My repeated attempts to play has now paid well. Now I know to tricks to drive (somewhat).

The golden rule is: never pull the brakes (space-bar). In NFS if u steer even slightly sidewards and pull brakes at the same time, ur car goes out of control and it spins. So rule 1, don’t use brakes. When u r approaching a turning then decrease ur speed, by releasing ur throttle (UP arrow key). If u sense that u need to gain some speed then tap on the UP key, don’t keep it pressed. Keeping the UP key pressed is like increasing the throttle and hence u will be accelerating, and if u have auto gear transmission enabled then u may quickly gain too much speed. This is also true for LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys, used for steering. Keeping them pressed means increasingly steering more and more to that direction. Hence, if for example u keep the LEFT key pressed then u r steering ur steering wheel continuously towards the maximum extent on the left. So rule 2, if u want to maintain the throttle or the steering of the steering wheel to some value between zero and maximum then tap the respective keys repeatedly; keeping it pressed will result it to go to the maximum value. When u r through the turn then fire a short burst of nitro to gain for the lost time. A long burst of nitro is no better than a short burst of it. So rule 3, fire only short burst of nitro, u will immediately accelerate. The trick to good driving is to learn the skill to get the ideal speed for the turning.

While playing NFS, while I was behind the A.I. cars I noticed that the computer too slows down just before a turning and when it is through it fires a short burst of nitro.

After unsuccessfully trying to beat #15 blacklist member for many days at last I discovered these golden rules. Then I successfully beat #15 and just after that in single attempt I beat #14 yesterday. U can download my NFS MW Black Ed saved game from here. I have only beaten #15 and #14 and I have cleared two challenges.

Some good NFS links:-
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1) ZModeller : It is a free complete 3d Modelling software exclusively made to edit and create 3d-Models for games. It supports many games including NFS.
2) NFS Cars: As its name suggests it is dedicated to NFS cars. It has a very big and active forum on of course NFS cars.
3) Ferrari for NFS MW: This is a link to a thread in NFS cars which deserves special mention. Forum member Arushan is busy cracking the file format of NFS MW and is making a tool which will allow u to add ur own car into NFS MW. He has already created the much missed Ferrari for NFS MW. Though still he has neither released the tool or the Ferrari. He promises it will be out when he has ironed out the problems.
4) NFS Planet: All about the Need for Speed games with actual News, many downloads, addon cars and tracks, cheats, pre- and reviews and tutorials.