Hi Liam, very good point! Here is some background info on the tools :-) FDAPM is the FreeDOS answer to MS DOS "POWER EXE", so it can be a resident tool to help you to save energy and keep your CPU cool by reducing activity while DOS is idle. It also has features such as power off, reboot, suspend, throttle CPU speed etc. and a separate DPMS screen saver tool bundled. While a bit of APM, ACPI and low-level calls are supported, compatibility varies a lot so features depend on your luck. UHDD has two core features: It is a disk cache and a driver to accelerate data transfer for fixed disks (harddisks and SSD and similar). However, because it has been co-developed with the CD/DVD/etc. driver UDVD2, the latter is able to share the cache functionality of UHDD. This means if you use UDVD2 as CD/DVD driver and UHDD as harddisk cache, you additionally get the feature of having a CD/DVD cache :-) Contents of both CD/DVD and fixed disks will then share the same XMS memory for cache contents. Given that you can set the UHDD cache size to anything from a few megabytes to a few gigabytes of RAM, the cache is a lot more powerful than my classic LBACACHE which only supports fixed disks. Both caches also support floppy, by the way. While LBACACHE is only a cache, UHDD contains various other ingredients to speed up working with your fixed disks significantly :-) Note that I also have the classic CDRCACHE: Unlike Jack's UHDD, you can connect CDRCACHE between any low-level CD/DVD driver and any filesystem driver such as SHSUCDX or MSCDEX. So while CDRCACHE only allows small caches of at most a few dozen megabytes, it lets you add caching functionality to third party drivers such as ELTORITO or AHCICD: See https://rloewelectronics.com/ for AHCICD. I recommend to ship the FreeDOS distro with UHDD and UDVD2, as well as optionally ELTORITO and CDRCACHE, because caches help a lot to get a fast system and a fast install process in particular on real hardware. UDVD2 supports IDE ATAPI and classic SATA CD/DVD drives. For SATA in AHCI mode, you can use AHCICD, which is now free software with sources, but not yet under open source license. Sadly, the inventor is dead. His son set his legacy free. The ELTORITO driver is a small wrapper for BIOS-supported CD/DVD/... access: You can only use it for the very CD/DVD you have booted from and it has limited features, but it works for all CD/DVD drives from which you can boot. On many computers, you can set your SATA controllers to classic mode in BIOS setup and then use UDVD2 and UHDD together to get very efficient CD/DVD access, which is important because CD/DVD can take a long time to gather file contents in random access scenarios such as copying many small files around or running an installer. Without a cache, those drives are only fast for few, large files and watching or listening to large multimedia tracks etc. I hope this answers some questions :-) Thanks for testing! Regards, Eric
I don't know if you realised, but you have mentioned UHDD several times without ever, that I have seen, saying what it is, what it is for, how it works or how to use it. I think you just assume everyone knows...
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