So, I've been toying around with the idea of buying Call of Duty 4 for PC from Steam for a while now, but I'm holding off until I'm really sure I'd like to, and don't just want to blow some money on anything (I'm a very impulsive buyer).


While looking at the specs, I noticed the game needs a whopping 8 gigs of free space to play. My free space at the time: a miserable 3 gigs. I recently re-partitioned my drive, because I've been toying around with Gentoo Linux again, so I sacrificed about 8gb to that.

The thing is, I have a wonderful 250gb Seagate external USB harddrive right on my desk, but I can't use it for a lot of things, because apps don't like installing/moving/etc. around on there. They like a very rigid registry structure and things like that. The bottom line is that Windows does not adapt well to some certain changes like that. Under linux, moving the files would require a very simple little fix to make everything work smoothly again: a symbolic 'soft' link between the new folder and the old location. Common symlinks, as they are known, are /usr/src/linux, which points to the current version of your kernel sources, and /etc/localtime, which points to the zoneinfo for your timezone (ie. changing from GMT to EST would be as simple as issuing ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST /etc/localtime).

I was under the impression that Windows just straight-up doesn't support this type of linking for a very long time. Then, I read about how it really DOES support it, but the tools are not very readily available to the user, without purchasing X software or Y package.

Today, I stumbled across an explorer shell extension that makes creating hard/soft links as simple as right-clicking. It also displays a little chain icon on a folder when you create a symbolic link, and a blue arrow when you create a hardlink. Very very useful.

I'm using it to split my Steam games up into local and external games. I don't play some of my games often, like Deus Ex, Deus Ex 2, and Shadowgrounds. Some of them, on the other hand, I play much more often, like Counterstrike:Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. The games I don't play take up a lot of space on my hard drive, so what I've done is moved the files for those games to my external harddrive, and replace the actual folders with symbolic links pointing to the external games. This way, I can play my games when I like, without having multiple copies of steam installed: