Essential Windows Tools For Seamlessly Migrating To A Solid State Drive

Switch from a standard platter drive to a solid state drive can have a drastic reduction on loading speed. It is definitely the preferable options for loading large complex applications or loading data intensive games. However, with the prices of SSDs being so high compared to HDDs, it's not possible to find solid state drives with storage sizes like1tb without spending a fortune. The best option is to consider a hybrid approach and to place your most and critical applications on the SSD, and to keep a high capacity HDD for use for storing and backing up media and data.

In the past, the only real way to do this without reinstalling your operating system was to clone the older HDD and then restore the image onto the new SDD. This would require reducing the size of the original drive to fit onto the smaller SDD, and to engage in a fairly lengthy and complicated process of cloning and restoring. However, there are some free tools that you can use in Windows which will allow seamless moves of data from one drive to another, without ever having to reformat, clone or image your drives. The tools listed in this guide can also be used to migrate or upgrade to any other drive, be they larger or smaller than the origin drive.

Ultimate List Of Steam Serial Keys From Retail

Steam always sells games at higher prices than in the retail stores. However, many retail copies of games contain serial keys that can be registered on Steam. By comparing Steam Store prices with retail prices, it is possible to find a Steam serial key that costs much less than buying directly from the Steam Store. For example, Order of War is available from the Steam Store for £29.99, but can be bought on Amazon for £2.60 including delivery. This retail copy can be registered and played on Steam without ever using the disc.

The following page is a list of every possible retail Steam key with a Metacritic rating over 60 that can be bought from retail. Each game title contains a link to its Steam Store page. My list includes a price from Amazon which is generated dynamically, as well as a link to Camelcamelcamel, a site which generates graphs of Amazon prices to track the decrease in price of a game over time. An explanation of how the graphs work is available in a previous article: Buy New Games For Less Using Graphs. The source of games that this article is based on is from Steam Support which lists the serial key formats of the games.

Last Updated: 18th January 2011.
Please comment if there are any new additions that I have missed.

(All versions linked are for Steam PC versions of games, even if the correct box art is not displayed).

Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free

Or How To Integrate Steam Cloud Features Into Any Game

Updated 19th January 2011: changed name of Windows Live Sync Beta to Windows Live Mesh 2011 to reflect name change of the service. At present, the program, service and UI are identical to Live Sync Beta.

A World of Warcraft Interface folder being synced.

The Steam Cloud is a service that allows the synchronizing of savegames and settings from one computer to another. This means that one could play a Steam game on one computer, and then when logging into Steam on another computer their savegames and preferences would automagically be transferred. This is a feature on many Steam games such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Torchlight, Trine, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Plants vs Zombies etc. However, although Steam Cloud is not available for all games it is still possible to sync savegames over the cloud using a program called Windows Live Mesh 2011. This free utility offers 2gb of storage (soon to be upgraded to 5gb) as well as automatically cloud syncing and peer to peer syncing.

Windows Live Mesh 2011 is far superior for the purposes of PC gamers to other popular syncing cloud services such as Dropbox. This is because Dropbox only allows a single designated Dropbox folder to be automatically synchronized. If you wanted to have automatic backup and syncing of say, your Mass Effect save game, you would have to either 1) manually copy the files or 2) create a fiddly symbolic link. Windows Live Mesh 2011 allows you to specify individual folders. This makes it possible to be extremely flexible in exactly what you want to synchronize. Windows Live Mesh 2011 also gives the option of direct peer to peer transfer bypassing the cloud, which gives a very good performance boost to certain syncs between computers and networks. Anyone who has used Dropbox or older versions of Mesh will know that it takes a long time to sync large files only through the cloud, so the peer to peer option is welcome.


Guide To Syncing Any Savegames Using Windows Live Mesh 2011

Step 1) Download the latest version of Windows Live Mesh 2011 using this link: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Windows Live Sync Beta is only available as part of the Windows Live Essentials Beta package. Make sure you only install what you need to (make sure to install Live Sync).