USB Stick Install

[Jazzepi]

I have a USB stick, and I'd love to be able to install dominions 3 to it and run the game from there while I'm at school so that I can check my gmail account and play turns from the public computers without installing anything onto them. Does anyone have any experience with doing that?

Our school computers are Vista D:

Jazzepi

[Rookierookie]

It would be really, really slow, and the stick would have a very short lifespan.

[MaxWilson]

I don't think it would cause any particular problems with the stick's lifespan, would it? Lifespan is limited by the number of writes, and running an .exe from off a stick just involves reads. The only writing you'd be doing is the ftherlnd and .2h/.trn files.

I haven't tried it, but I bet you could just copy your whole dom3 directory onto the stick and run it like normal. It probably would be a little bit slow to load, but it would work.

-Max

[WingedDog]

I travel pretty often becouse of my work and have dominions installed on my USB stick for about a year and never had a single problem. I ran it on many different PC's during that time and can say the speed of the game is the same as if you run it on HDD, and depends only on PC characteristics (mainly processor and video card). And dominions work fine with Vista.
P.S. Why worry about USB stick lifespan anyway? Prices on them drop rapidly.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

I don't think it would cause any particular problems with the stick's lifespan, would it? Lifespan is limited by the number of writes, and running an .exe from off a stick just involves reads. The only writing you'd be doing is the ftherlnd and .2h/.trn files.

I haven't tried it, but I bet you could just copy your whole dom3 directory onto the stick and run it like normal. It probably would be a little bit slow to load, but it would work.

-Max

I'd be surprised if it adversely affected my USB stick's life span too much. I figure the program would load itself into memory, and then munch on the USB card some more to get the data off for a particular game.

From wikipedia, with an emphasis on the write cycle. It does mention of read cycles damaging the flash memory once:

Limited write (erase) cycles: Flash-memory cells will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC[15], while high endurance cells may have an endurance of 1–5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer).[30][31][32] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device (so-called wear leveling), rather than rewriting files in place.[33] In 2008 wear leveling was just beginning to be incorporated into consumer level devices.[15] However, effective write cycles can be much less, because when a write request is made to a particular memory block, all data in the block is overwritten even when only part of the memory is altered. The write amplification, as referred by Intel, can be reduced using write memory buffer.[34] In combination with wear leveling, over-provisioning SSD flash drives with spared memory capacity also delays the loss of user-accessible memory capacity. NAND memory can be negatively impacted by read and program (write) disturbs arising from over accessing a particular NAND location. This overuse of NAND locations causes bits within the NAND block to erroneously change values. Wear leveling, by redirecting SSD writes to lesser-used NAND locations, thus reduces the potential for program or write disturbs.[35] An example for the lifetime of SSD is explained in detail in this wiki.[dubious – discuss] SSDs based on DRAM, however, do not suffer from this problem.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by WingedDog

I travel pretty often becouse of my work and have dominions installed on my USB stick for about a year and never had a single problem. I ran it on many different PC's during that time and can say the speed of the game is the same as if you run it on HDD, and depends only on PC characteristics (mainly processor and video card). And dominions work fine with Vista.
P.S. Why worry about USB stick lifespan anyway? Prices on them drop rapidly.

Awesome. I'll have to try this out then.

Jazzepi

[Tolkien]

I've done it before, and it runs fine.

[Endoperez]

I just copied the game files and it works fine.