In the last guide, I showed you how to extract files from multi-part archives. If you want to create on of these archives yourself, follow this guide. This guide will show you how to create multi-part archives with the following tools:

• 7-Zip
• WinRAR

Why would you want to create a multi-part archive?

• You want to email a large file to a friend but your email limits attachment sizes to 20MB.
• You want to host a file and want people to have a greater chance of wasting less time with failed downloads.
• You have a file that’s over 4GB and you’re moving it to a file system that doesn’t support such a large size (i.e. FAT32.)
• You need to spread the archive across multiple thumb drives, CDs, DVDs etc.

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Do you have several physical hard-drives on your computer, but would like to have them collaborating as one? This can be useful for smaller SSD-drives or similar.

A quick Note before we continue!
Spanned volumes are not RAID volumes and they are not fault tolerant. If one of the disks in the volume should fail, you lose the data on both disks. That being said, let’s continue…

Preparations

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As all screens are not created equal, which is why Microsoft have bundled a display color calibration tool with Windows 7. This tool is easy to use and this guide serves as a checklist for using it.

You should use this tool if:

• You’ve not calibrated your screen yet.
• You’ve changed monitors (even if it was calibrated with another computer.)

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Windows Guides’ Rating	User Rating	Compatible with	System
5 out of 5	(46 votes, average: 2.35 out of 5)

Here’s a little reminder on the JV16 PowerTools Giveaway Contest which runs through Sunday If you didn’t see the review on JV16 PowerTools 2010 you might want to do so now. Jv16 PowerTools is the ultimate Windows optimization and tune-up utility suite, and by far the best tool I have every put to the test.

The Competition is open to everyone !

The competition has now ended.

Winners will receive notification by email.
Thank you to all contributors.

Localization:

For those of you tuned in from around the world – welcome. I’m a Kiwi (a person from New Zealand) and this article was written primarily to address NZ Windows Media Center users lack of access to the Electronic Program Guide from Sky Broadcasting.

Having said that, there are topics covered herein that could well be of use to others beyond the borders of New Zealand. Our primary tool in this article is “Big Screen EPG” that’s now being used by many people around the world to push the contents of an XMLTV file (the EPG information) into the Windows Media Center database. If this sort of thing is of interest to you, please read on.

Did you miss the previous posts in this series?

• Big Screen EPG Puts the “E” in Electronic Program Guide [Part 1 of 3]
• Big Screen EPG Puts the “E” in Electronic Program Guide [Part 2 of 3]

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You’ll recall from New and Improved EPG that Big Screen has just released a final (not a beta) version of their Big Screen EPG program that grabs program guides from the internet, prepares them, and loads their data into Windows Media Center’s Program Guide to use in conjunction with the WMC Live TV function. We ran through a basic setup of the program in part I, in part II we’ll cover the setup process in more detail, examining the options and perhaps arriving at a transparent process that will provide you with the best EPG for the New Zealand broadcast area.

Did you miss the previous post in this series?

• Big Screen EPG Puts the “E” in Electronic Program Guide [Part 1 of 3]

Read the rest of this entry »