{"id":4204,"date":"2018-06-29T23:09:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-30T03:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/?p=4204"},"modified":"2018-06-29T23:10:38","modified_gmt":"2018-06-30T03:10:38","slug":"virtual-confusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/?p=4204","title":{"rendered":"Virtual Confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, I get it. FreePCB<\/a> is kind of dated and I should really learn Eagle<\/a> at some point. But it’s still a useful tool — at least, when Windows doesn’t get in its way.<\/p>\n

FreePCB, unfortunately, defaults to storing project files in a “projects” folder in its own working directory. This makes some sense, but ultimately documents are supposed to be stored in the proper place — not where the program is installed.<\/p>\n

I agree this is best practice — but Windows (since Vista) takes things a step farther, as I found out today. If a 32-bit program is not running with administrator privileges and isn’t compiled for Vista or later, that means it can get “virtualized.”<\/p>\n

What this means, in practical terms, is that, since Windows no longer allows programs to write to the “Program Files (x86)” directory structure, it makes a shadow copy of this structure and redirects all writes to that.<\/p>\n

The problem arises when you want to, for example, go find these files that the program has written. They’re nowhere to be found in the\u00a0“Program Files (x86)” structure — and yet, the program can exit, relaunch, and reload the files with no problem at all.\u00a0Witchcraft!<\/em><\/p>\n

Figuring that the files had to be somewhere on the drive, I went back to first principles and ran a search.<\/p>\n

c:\\>dir \/s \/b *.fpc<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a brief search, the files were found in the c:\\Users\\…\\local\\VirtualStore\\ substructure. A quick Google search turned up the following explanation<\/a>, paraphrased above.<\/p>\n

Mystery solved. But some notice would have been appreciated, MS. Maybe one of those pop-up boxes you’re so fond of using to steal the focus at the worst possible times. Or something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which I learn that Windows doesn’t always store files where you ask it to. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sysadmin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4204"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4207,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4204\/revisions\/4207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paleotechnologist.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}