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RAMdisk installationA RAMdisk is required to provide faster access to the FSY file which is used by TelliCast to buffer incoming data from the satellite as individual files are built up. As several files may be coming in at the same time, access to this file is very frequent, and unless the file lives on a fast disk, data can be lost. Using a RAMdisk removes any of the delay caused by the mechanical aspects of a hard disk (the movement of the arm to position the heads over the right track, and the rotation of the disk to place the data under the read-write heads). The free AR Soft RAMdisk software (available to members of the MSG-1 Yahoo group) appears to function correctly under Windows Vista, provided that you tell Vista that the program is a Windows 2000 one. You do this with the following steps. First, select the file, and right-click it. In the screen-shot below you will see I have named the file arsoft-ramdisk-setup.exe, as there are rather a large number of files named setup.exe! Select the Properties item from the pop-up menu.
Within the Properties dialog, select the Compatibility tab, and from the drop-down list select Windows 2000, and click on OK.
Once you have set the setup program's compatibility, you need to run it in Administrator mode. Right click the setup program, and select Run as Administrator.
The first screen is a standard Welcome screen. Press Next.
As usual, you need to accept the licence agreement. Please note that the free version available from the MSG-1 Yahoo group does not include support from AR Soft! Accept the agreement.
You wish to Install the RAMdisk, so be sure that the Install option is selected, and press Install.
Leave the Configure box checked, and press Finish.
Next, you must configure the RAMdisk to support EUMETCast. Change the Operating mode from RAM Disk mode to Emulate a local hard disk.
You need to size the RAMdisk according to the data you wish to take from EUMETCast. For the full MSG-1 data, FSD, EARS AVHRR, and the Metop-AVHRR data, and 80MB RAMdisk is a good starting size. Use the slide control to select 80MB. Yes, the slider is a little coarse, so use the left and right arrow keys to refine your value to just 80MB, and the press OK.
The first time I got one of these dialogs - perhaps if I had used Windows 2000 compatibility the first time I would not have done?
To tell TelliCast to use the new RAMdisk, you need to edit the recv.ini file. Using Windows Explorer, select the recv.ini file from the location where you installed the TelliCast software, and double-click on it:
Within notepad, add the file_database_directory line to the [locations] section, and comment out any existing file_database_directory line by placing a hash (#) character at the from of the line. I do this so that I can see what I have changed, and so that I can revert if a change doesn't work!
Next, in the [parameters] section add a file_database_size line, setting the value to 83,000,000 (without the commas!). Be sure to enter the correct number of zeros!
You will need to reboot your PC for the new RAMdisk size to become effective, and this will also restart TelliCast which is required to make it re-read the changed recv.ini file. RAMdisk notes:
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