Faceprov.log and Lenovo

I was in a hurry when I wrote this, and didn’t get to go through it to sufficiently de-geek it.  Even though this is filed under nerdy talk, it should still make some sense.  Will fix that up here soon.

I’m cleaning up files and ran across this one, c:\faceprov.log. I’ve got a Lenovo and I’m guessing it’s from the face detection feature, but I tried googling it this morning and only got a handful of results; most of them in languages I couldn’t decipher. For the record, I’ve deleted it without any ill effects so far.

On a side note, I’m a little .. mystified? Confused? I’m not sure what the word is I’m looking for, because I’m not angry. Just wondering why a smart company like Lenova would install Vista on a tiny C partition, and leave it configured to automatically store all programs and user profile data on that same space.

Granted, with a fair amount of work you can force Windows to save data to another drive, but my laptop has this special little ‘novo’ button — right by the power button, no less — that you press and it reformats the windows partition.  Potentially undoing all my changes.  No prompt for a password even.  A one-button format -might- be a good idea had they taken the time to make windows save data to another drive. But as is, if the user isn’t savvy enough to save their data to D, they lose it all. Why,
Lenovo, why? You’re such a great company otherwise…

Yesterday I upgraded Open Office update and forgot to set the installation to my D drive. That extra 150 MB or so on C was enough to crowd my pagefile in a big way. As you might imagine, this caused a series of unfortunate events, and it took me till this morning to figure out why I kept crashing.

But the good news is that -because- my system kept crashing, I thought to move my whole page file over to that large D drive where it can have its own dedicated 4GB. Even with 3GB of physical ram and memory-hogging features disabled, I can tell Windows relies heavily on my virtual memory, particularly when I’m using photoshop for a print job. If I recall correctly, the laptop came with just 4GB free on C, and the difference I’ve seen from switching it over to the other drive is significant.

I thought about posting a how-to here, but the fact is, Microsoft has its own how-tos on their site, and there are dozens of other sites out there with how-tos and more information still. If you’d still like MY how-to, drop me an email. A few dozen emails later, I decided I may as well post what I’d been sending people as well. So it’s up there & ready for you to use at your own liability.

If you need further help, I don’t know whether Lenovo’s tech support can help step you through such drastic system modifications but I can say they’ve been excellent when I’ve called them for hardware issues. If you -still- would rather have me step you through it, drop me a note and we can try to schedule something via phone. Just know that as a single mom taking a full load at college and trying to provide for my kids, the phrase “free time” is a paradox. Good luck!

Tags: computers, files, technology, windows

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Geek Speak. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.