The post Taming Windows 95/98/98SE/ME Out of Memory Errors appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The post 64 bits or bust appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The post Speeding up a sluggish HP Mini 110 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The post Increasing memory cache to improve Firefox performance appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I found a review.

The post A Readyboost alternative for XP appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Of course when I installed Norton Utilities 8 I installed NDOS, its command.com replacement. Built-in command history, improved resident utilities, and thanks to its memory management, it actually uses far less conventional memory (but more memory total) than command.com. That's OK; with 6 MB of RAM I can afford to give up a fair bit of extended memory for better functionality.

Once I was happy with all that, I also attacked the startup files. I started off with a basic config.sys:

device=c:doshimem.sys
device=c:dosemm386.exe noems
dos=high,umb
files=30

Then I went into autoexec.bat, consolidated the PATH statements into one (it read: PATH C:WINDOWS;C:DOS;C:DOS
u;C:MOUSE) and added the prefix LH to all lines that ran TSRs or device drivers (such as MOUSE.EXE). Upon further reflection, I should have moved the Mouse directory into C:DOS to save a root directory entry.

I added the NCACHE2 disk cache to autoexec.bat-- NCACHE2 /ext=4096 /optimize=s /usehigh=on /a a c /usehma=on /multi=on. That turns on multitasking, enables caching of both C: and A:, tells it to use 4 MB of memory, use high memory, and use extended memory. My goal was to use as much memory as prudently as possible, since I'd be using this just for DOS (and mosly for running Norton Utilities).

I also set up a 512K RAMdisk using RAMDRIVE.SYS (devicehigh=c:dos
amdrive.sys 512 128 4). Then I added these lines to autoexec.bat:

md d: emp
set tmp=d: emp
set temp=d: emp

Now when an app wants to write temp files, it does it to a RAMdisk. The other parameters tell it to use 128K sectors to save space, and put 4 entries in the root directory, also to save space. With DOS 5, that was the minimum. I don't need any more than one, since I'm making a subdirectory. I could just point the temp directory to the root of D:, but I'd rather have dynamic allocation of the number of directory entries. This setting is more versatile--if I need two big files in the temp directory, I'm not wasting space on directory entries. If on the other hand I need tons of tiny files, I'm guaranteed not to run out of entries.

It's not a barn burner by any stretch, but it's reasonably quick considering its specs. Now when someone trashes a floppy disk, I can just throw it in the 320P, run Disk Doctor and Disktool on it (and in a pinch, Norton Disk Editor), copy the data to the HD, then throw the recovered data onto a new, freshly formatted floppy. I'll only use it a couple of times a year, but when I need such a beast, I need it badly. And if I have the need to run some other old obscure DOS program that won't run on newer machines, the 320P can come to my rescue again too. It runs the software well, it boots in seconds--what more can I ask?

I could have done a couple more things, such as a  screen accelerator and a keyboard accelerator . Maybe today if I have time.

I was tempted to put Small Linux ( http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/ ) on it, but frankly, DOS 5 and Norton Utilities 8 is more useful to me. I'm not sure what I'd do with a non-networkable Linux box with only 6 MB RAM and a monochrome display.

A useful (but unfortunately dated) link. I stumbled across this yesterday: The BIOS Survival Guide , a nicely-done guide to BIOS settings. Unfortunately it stopped being maintained in 1997, so it's most useful for tweaking very old PCs. Still, it's better than nothing, and most modern PCs still have most of these settings. And reading this does give you a prayer of understanding the settings in a modern PC.

If you want to optimize your BIOS, this is about as good a starting point as you're going to find online for free. For more recent systems, you'll be better served by The BIOS Companion, written by Phil Croucher (one of the co-authors of this piece.) You can get a sample from that book at http://www.electrocution.com/biosc.htm .

New iMac flavors. Steve Jobs unveiled the new iMacs this week. The new flavors: Blue Dalmation and Flower Power. Yes, they're as hideous as they sound. Maybe worse. Check the usual news outlets. They'd go great in a computer room with a leopard-skin chair, shag carpet, and lava lamps. And don't forget the 8-track cranking out Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead tunes.

I think the outside-the-box look of Mir, the PC Gatermann and I built as a Linux gateway (see yesterday), is far more tasteful--and that's not exactly the best idea we ever had.

The post Optimizing DOS and the BIOS, plus new iMacs appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Last night, I sent myself hurtling 120 miles at 75 MPH to Columbia, Mo. My mom lives there, and my alma mater, the University of Missouri, is also there. Today, after morning services, I'm headed another 120 miles to Kansas City, where most of my mom's family lives. I don't get back there very often, so I'm looking forward to it.

I've got some stuff to write, but I'll be late for services if I do, so it'll have to wait.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: "Lawrence Kim" <lykim@nospam.telusplanet.net>
Subject: A loyal reader w/a technical question

Dear Dave: I have a few questions, well, maybe just one, related to your book.  When you do a clean install of W98SE on a partitioned drive, if you wipe C: (where W98 is), how do you get the other programs on the other drives to run again?  Especially if you've wiped all the .dll files and other important stuff?  Secondly, what's a good and fast way not to have to reload all the programs again if you wipe & reinstall W98?  If I used Drive Image 4.0 or a tool like that (or maybe even Norton Ghost), how do you copy images of your drive back onto your computer?  Lastly, what's the best way to optimize your ADSL/highspeed Internet connection?  I've been using this program called NetSuperSonic which is supposed to adjust certain registry settings in Windows to optimize it for broadband use.  It seems to work pretty good, but I was wondering if you would have some other suggestions.  That's pretty much everything.  Oh yeah, are you going to come out with a new, updated book?  I don't know, just thought that I would ask. That's for writing the book; it's been extremely helpful.

Cheers.

~~~~~

I think that's actually more than one question, but that's ok of course.

The idea of a clean install is to start over, which of course means reinstalling everything. Reinstalling everything takes time, of course, but the benefit is that you're rid of all those old, no-longer-in-use DLLs and other leftovers that hang around after you uninstall programs. You've also got fresh copies of everything and a brand-new registry, which is good because registries get corrupt and so can DLLs and even programs. The result is a faster, more stable system.

But if you've lost the installation files for some of your programs, you've got a problem. You can use CleanSweep or Uninstaller to package up the program, DLLs, and its registry entries for re-installation, but be sure to test the package on another PC before you wipe, because these don't always work.

Ghost or Drive Image aren't a clean install per se, because they preserve everything. Generally the way I save and restore images is to a network drive, or in the case of a standalone PC, to an extra partition or, better yet, a second hard drive. You can also span an image to multiple Zip, Jaz, or Orb disks but that's slower and more cumbersome. These programs are absolutely invaluable for disaster recovery, but as optimization tools in their own right, their benefit is very limited.

If NetSupersonic checks your MTU and adjusts it properly (many of those utilities don't), that's a great start. You can measure your speed by going to http://www.pcpitstop.com/internetcenter.asp, and they have some suggestions on the site for fixing sub-optimal perfomance. Ad-blocking software will speed you up as much as anything else you can do, and FastNet99 (mentioned in the book) is also useful by reducing the number of DNS lookups you have to do (I accomplished the same thing by connecting my DSL modem to a Linux box running its own DNS, which I then used to share my DSL out to my Windows PCs).

As for an updated book, I imagine not doing one would probably kill me. But publishers are understandably hesitant to do one right now, since no one seems to know what Microsoft will do next. Is Windows Me really the end? Is Windows 2000's successor really going to be suitable for home use? When will Microsoft manage to deliver another OS? No publisher wants to invest tens of thousands of dollars in producing a book only to find out they guessed wrong. Once there are answers to those questions, it'll be time to write a new book. In the meantime, I'm writing magazine articles (there's very little new in the article at www.computershopper.co.uk this month; there are a couple of new tricks in the article for February, and the article for March is almost entirely new stuff) and posting new tricks to my own site as I find them or think of them. So the answer to your question is, "probably," but I can't give you any kind of time frame.

Hopefully that answers your questions. If not, feel free to write back.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: "Lawrence Kim" <lykim@nospam.telusplanet.net>
Subject: Drive Image Pt. 2

The post 12/24/2000 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Which reminds me, I really do need to get an OS/2 box running again, and get serious about BeOS while I'm at it...

Windows Me can't handle more than a half-gig of RAM. This also from The Reg. Story here. The vcache workaround is legit; no one has ever demonstrated to me the benefit of using more than 4 megs for a Win9x disk cache anyway.

The post Running something other than Windows is theft appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

The built-in memory test has detected a problem with cache memory. Please contact a service technician for assistance.

So I called Apple. You get 90 days' free support, period. (You also only get a one-year warranty unless you buy the AppleCare extended warranty, which I'm loathe to do. But I we'd probably better do it for this machine since it all but screams "lemon" every time we boot it.) So, hey, we can't get anywhere with this, so let's start burning up the support period.

The hold time was about 15 seconds. I mention this because that's the only part of the call that impressed me and my mother taught me to say whatever nice things I could. I read the message to the tech, who then put me on hold, then came back in about a minute.

"That message is caused by a defective memory module. Replace the third-party memory module to solve the problem," she said.

"But the computer is saying the problem is with cache, not with the memory," I told her. (The cache for the G4 resides on a small board along with the CPU core, sort of like the first Pentium IIs, only it plugs into a socket.) She repeated the message to me. I was very impressed that she didn't ask whether we'd added any memory to the system (of course we had--Apple factory memory would never go bad, I'm sure).

I seem to remember at least one of my English teachers telling me to write exactly what I mean. Obviously the Mac OS 9 programmers didn't have any of my English teachers.

I took the memory out and cleaned it with a dollar bill, then put it back in. The system was fine for the rest of the afternoon after this, but I have my doubts about this system. If the problem returns, I'll replace the memory. When that turns out not to be the problem, I don't know what I'll do.

We've been having some problems lately with Micron tech support as well, but there's a big difference there. With Apple, if you don't prove they caused the problem, well, it's your problem, and they won't lift a finger to help you resolve it. Compare this to Micron. My boss complained to Micron about the length of time it was taking to resolve a problem with one particular system. You know what the Micron tech said? "If this replacement CPU doesn't work, I'll replace the system." We're talking a two-year-old system here.

Now I know why Micron has more business customers than Apple does. When you pay a higher price for a computer (whether that's buying a Micron Client Pro instead of a less-expensive, consumer-oriented Micron Millenia, or an Apple G4 instead of virtually any PC), you expect quick resolution to your computer problems because, well, your business doesn't slow down just because your computer doesn't work right. Micron seems to get this. Apple doesn't.

And that probably has something to do with why our business now has 25 Micron PCs for every Mac. There was a time when that situation was reversed.

The joke was obvious, but... I still laughed really hard when I read today's User Friendly. I guess I'm showing my age here by virtue of getting this.

Then again, three or four years back, a friend walked up to me on campus. "Hey, I finally got a 64!" I gave him a funny look. "Commodore 64s aren't hard to find," I told him. Then he laughed. "No, a Nintendo 64."

It's funny how nicknames recycle themselves.

For old times' sake. I see that Amiga, Inc. must be trying to blow out the remaining inventory of Amiga 1200s, because they're selling this machine at unprecedented low prices. I checked out www.softhut.com just out of curiosity, and I can get a bare A1200 for $170. A model with a 260MB hard drive is $200.  On an Amiga, a drive of that size is cavernous, though I'd probably eventually rip out the 260-megger and put in a more modern drive.

The A1200 was seriously underpowered when it came out, but at that price it's awfully tempting. It's less than used A1200s typically fetch on eBay, when they show up. I can add an accelerator card later after the PowerPC migration plan firms up a bit more. And Amigas tend to hold their value really well. And I always wanted one.

I'm so out of the loop on the Amiga it's not even funny, but I found it funny that as I started reading so much started coming back. The main commands are stored in a directory called c, and it gets referred to as c: (many crucial Amiga directories are referenced this way, e.g. prefs: and devs: ). Hard drives used to be DH0:, DF1:, etc., though I understand they changed that later to HD0:, HD1:, etc.

So what was the Amiga like? I get that question a lot. Commodore released one model that did run System V Unix (the Amiga 3000UX), but for the most part it ran its own OS, known originally as AmigaDOS and later shortened to AmigaOS. Since the OS being developed internally at Amiga, Inc., and later at Commodore after they bought Amiga, wasn't going to be ready on time for a late 1984/early 1985 release, Commodore contracted with British software developer Metacomco to develop an operating system. Metacomco delivered a Tripos-derived OS, written in MC68000 assembly language and BCPL, that offered fully pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, and dynamic memory allocation (two things even Mac OS 9 doesn't do yet--OS 9 does have multithreading but its multitasking is cooperative and its memory allocation static).

Commodore spent the better part of the next decade refining and improving the OS, gradually replacing most of the old BCPL code with C code, stomping bugs, adding features and improving its looks. The GUI never quite reached the level of sophistication that Mac OS had, though it certainly was usable and had a much lower memory footprint. The command line resembled Unix in some ways (using the / for subdirectories rather than ) and DOS in others (you used devicename:filename to address files). Some command names resembled DOS, others resembled Unix, and others neither (presumably they were Tripos-inspired, but I know next to nothing about Tripos).

Two modern features that AmigaOS never got were virtual memory and a disk cache. As rare as hard drives were for much of the Amiga's existance this wasn't missed too terribly, though Commodore announced in 1989 that AmigaDOS 1.4 (never released) would contain these features. AmigaDOS 1.4 gained improved looks, became AmigaOS 2.0, and was released without the cache or virtual memory (though both were available as third-party add-ons).

As for the hardware, the Amiga used the same MC68000 series of CPUs that the pre-PowerPC Macintoshes used. The Amiga also had a custom chipset that provided graphics and sound coprocessing, years before this became a standard feature on PCs. This was an advantage for years, but became a liability in the early 1990s. While Apple and the cloners were buying off-the-shelf chipsets, Commodore continued having to develop their own for the sake of backward compatibility. They revved the chipset once in 1991, but it was too little, too late. While the first iteration stayed state of the art for about five years, it only took a year or two for the second iteration to fall behind the times, and Motorola was having trouble keeping up with Intel in the MHz wars (funny how history repeats itself), so the Amigas of 1992 and 1993 looked underpowered. Bled to death by clueless marketing and clueless management (it's arguable who was worse), Commodore bled engineers for years and fell further and further behind before finally running out of cash in 1993.

Though the Amiga is a noncontender today, its influence remains. It was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature color displays of more than 16 colors (it could display up to 4,096 at a time), stereo sound, and pre-emptive multitasking--all features most of us take for granted today. And even though it was widely dismissed as a gaming machine in its heyday, the best-selling titles for the computer that ultimately won the battle are, you guessed it, games.

The post Apple. you call this tech support? appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A Mac tech at his limits. One of the organizations I support has asked permission to bring in an outside consultant because they've, in something close to their words, found a problem Dave can't seem to solve. Never mind they didn't ask me to fix it. And never mind they're probably chasing the Bogeyman. In my estimation, 90% of Mac problems are either related to extensions conflicts or disk/filesystem errors. This machine loads maybe a dozen extensions, so that's not an issue. But it's a wannabe server, so of course it has filesystem errors constantly.

Not that that's the issue. Find me a tech who isn't almost always at his/her limits. If they aren't, they're not growing. This industry's so constantly changing that it's nearly impossible to stay away from the fringes of your knowledge.

And good night. My songwriting partner asked me to call him today if my voice was cooperating. It seems to be. I wrote no usable lyrics yesterday. But I can give him a leftover that I wrote back in 1997 or early 1998. It's a total Seven Red Seven ripoff, but seeing as that band's hardly a household name, I don't think anyone will know, and the song I ripped off from was itself a ripoff of Depeche Mode's Never Let Me Down Again. That's all assuming we even use the thing, of course.

I'd best make that phone call... Mail's all answered and sent, so it may make an appearance tonight. Otherwise, look for it tomorrow.

Strange Windows development. While working on one Win98 box, I decided to see if I could figure out once and for all the optimal disk cache settings for Win98 on another. The preliminary answer is very surprising. On this partcular machine at least, 3072 bytes (3 megs) seems optimal. With higher settings, you get slightly (and I mean slightly) higher benchmarks, insignificant enough to appear not worth investing even one more meg. The difference between 4 megs and anything higher is even less significant.

I'll have to try this out with some other systems and other benchmarks, of course. I figured optimal wouldn't be any higher than 8 megs, but I'm a bit surprised to see it at 3. Optimal may depend greatly on the drive involved, however. But I thought a good percentage of you would be interested in that.

Whatever the results, it appears the conventional wisdom of using 1/4 to 1/8 your system RAM for disk caching may be incorrect, at least on today's high-memory PCs.

I see Naviscope mistakes my logo for an ad. I'll have to rename the file to fix that. Naviscope is an ad/cookie blocking program that doubles as a DNS cache. A Linux box sitting on your network is more versatile and capable at both, but Naviscope is easier.

Want a real computer? Amiga has changed its mind yet again about the hardware aspect of its strategy. Will we be running on commodity hardware? At least not exclusively, if The Register has its story straight. Unfortunately, at this point I'm afraid anything they might do is likely to be too little, too late. It's hard for any system, no matter how good it is, to survive seven years of stagnation. Sure, Amiga was 8-10 years ahead of its time. In 1985. By 1993, their lead was really dwindling. And of course, by 1995 the masses got preemptive multitasking and everything else they would have had if they'd bought an Amiga in the first place. And they didn't seem to mind the wait. That last bit troubles me, but hey.

I'd still love to see them come back and mop up the floor using the rest of the industry (Microsoft and Apple need some humiliation), but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Outta here. I seem to have caught cold, so I'm going to cut myself short. Hopefully it'll be a slow day at work so I don't run myself into the ground.

The post 10/23/2000 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.