Hi Gil, Clarence and all, it looks like the hardware does slow down your machine. There are some utilities to check it out (drhard, sandra) If you don't have it, I can send to you. But you can also check some points by yourself:
If you have cache (maybe 386 has) check in BIOS-setup if it is enabled. Cache speeds up your system about 20 - 30 % Also check in BIOS-setup if the BIOS is shadowed to RAM. Also 10 - 20 % speedup. If you have the manual from your motherboard, look if there are jumpers to set up the CPU-clock. Regards Guenter On Fri, 15 Mar 2002 03:41:44 -0400, Clarence Verge wrote: > Some MAY be interested, ALL should be interested. <G> > I was trying to help Gil Parrish get his 20MHz '386 working respectably > with Arachne. I know what kind of result is possible because I also > have Arachne on a 20Mhz '386. > The project started with getting his HD speeded up, and things were NOT > going well. In fact, his HD was twice as slow as mine using speedchk. > To eliminate the HD itself from the equation, I suggested he run speedchk > on his RAMdisk, and his results were again twice as slow as mine. > http://www.hwcn.org/~ao773/myfiles/download/Clarences/speedchk.zip > His words re: his OS: > OK, this is setup I'm using. (Incidentally, the computer is dutifully > running DR-DOS v7.02, which I understand is supposed to be good for > ARACHNE.) > His words: > Run entirely on the RAMdisk (almost 2.7 meg free), and to within a second, > all trials were 51 seconds to write, and 52 seconds to also clean up. > My words: > I'm VERY concerned about those times on the ramdisk. Something is very > wrong. You said you had a 20Mhz '386 right ? > Does it have a turbo switch ? It seems to be running at 10Mhz right now. > his>> 386SX, 20MHZ. NO TURBO SWITCH. > his>> CONFIG.SYS (Arachne-configured) has BUFFERS=20 and FILES=20. > mine> Change that to Buffers=15 Files=30. That's what I use. > his>> EXACT SAME RESULTS: 51 TO FINISH, 52 TO ALSO CLEAN UP. > Since my box was running 22 sec and 23 sec I asked: >> Would you try my software to see if it is a hardware problem ? > He agreed, and here is his result: > Gil> Well, I would have to agree my performance increased a wee bit. > Gil> SPEEDCHK reported 23 seconds to write AND clean up on the RAMdisk. > Gil> Maybe DR-DOS isn't all it's cracked up to be? > * > Maybe OSs written in "C" need to run on a Pentium ? <G> > BTW, before I sent Gil the boot disk, I tried it on my DOS 5.0 P90 which > usually takes 4 secs to run speedchk on the ramdisk. > The boot disk uses IBM PCDOS 3.3 and it cut the P90 time to 2 seconds.<G> > - Clarence Verge > - Back to using Arachne V1.62 ....
