I've got the power

There's nothing like a week plus power outage to make you want to do a running jump off the pier and cannonball back into video gaming. Let's get to GTA 4 and finish it before GTA 5 comes out - I should have about half a year.

First, some housekeeping. While running all my updates on my long dormant computer, I notice I still have a lot of game shortcuts in my Favorites, for long since finished games. I should really trim those out of there, but not before "packing" each one away. That means following the "saves" and "screenshots" shortcuts, extracting any content, RARing it up, and filing it away in the archives. Then I can uninstall the games.

I can't quite delete the screenshots taken in Steam games, yet, if ever. It leaves big gaping holes in the screenshot window in Steam, as files are not found. What I've been doing is zeroing in on the screenshots that matter, naming and uploading those to Steam's cloud, and deleting the rest from within the Steam screenshot manager. What will happen when I re-install - will those uploaded shots come back down to my machine? I guess I'll find out on the next re-install, which I'm getting due for. In the meanwhile, I can clear the shortcut from my favorites, letting me know I'm done with it.

My Fallout 3 saves are 8 gb - why would I need to keep this. Let's see how it compresses. The compression ratio is about 33%, but that's still a fairly big chunk to file. I'll take a dir snapshot of it, and toss it, saving only the first and last save, and the few administrative files.