Well, after yet another RTFM and half an hour of fingers-crossed
reconfiguring of the BIOS/CMOS settings, I think I'm now booting faster.
It's a bit hard to tell, because I finally figured out how to do
something that needed doing.
If any of you use SCSI HDDs, and if any of you have an adapter card with
built-in BIOS onboard, and if any of you have utilities accessible
during bootup because of that onboard BIOS, you might seriously consider
doing what I did.
I have "data security" and "access security" on my system thanks to some
pretty decent software. However, software only comes into play after
all the built-in stuff is finished doing what it wants to do and after
config.sys ... which meant that, although no unauthorized individuals
could actually log on to my system, anyone who sat down at my computer
and paid attention during bootup could hit the DEL key at the correct
moment, access the SCSI utilities, and totally format/wipe both my
multi-gigabyte HDDs.
So I had to find a way to set up a system password. That's the primary
reason I spent so much time RTFMing and experimenting. And now,
finally, you can't get on my system at all, can't get past memory check
and IDE check, without the correct password. :) whew!!! One nice
thing about this problem, one I've been thinking of seriously for a
number of months now, is that I "spoke" with the people over at DTC
about how this could make a system terribly vulnerable to malicious
vandalism or just stupidity. My correspondent advised that he would be
getting together with the development team to work on building in some
sort of password protection within the onboard BIOS of their future SCSI
adapter cards. This is A Good Thing(tm).
Yes, anyone who wanted to take my system and pull the HDDs and install
them in another system could still access almost everything on my HDD
[some of it is zipped with password, so I think they'd fail there]. But
now no one unauthorized can just sit down, turn my system on, and then
wipe almost 20 years of work and gigabytes of software.
A nice side benefit I hadn't thought of: Now you can't even boot to a
floppy without the system password. Since I often use floppies with
special config/autoexec on them for certain tasks, I often have my CMOS
set to boot A/C rather than C/A. Now it won't matter.
As to the balance of the RANT -- I spent most of 6 hours trying my
damndest to maximize cache size so that I could make Win3.1 happy ...
I'm working with some relatively HUGE graphics files, and need to use my
GW under win. And Win3.1 kept telling me "memory error" when processing
certain files. I configured & reconfigured ncache and optimized and
reoptimized QEMM, and the results were always the same. :<
This totally SUCKED!! Soooo, I thought and thought and thought ... and I
realized that the "memory error" was no such thing! It was a matter of
the software trying to write a file to a CD in a nonwritable CD-ROM
drive!! ARGHH!! How many hours would have been saved if the error
messages passed by dozerware were accurate, rather than designed for the
totally ignorant who wouldn't know the difference between memory
available to process and storage space accessible/available!
That's two more check marks by WillyDoors' name on my hit list.
l.d.
-- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
