Re: 701 and win95

["John H. Kim" <jokim@MIT.EDU>]

On Sat, 10 Aug 1996, Randy Whittle wrote:
> At 09:05 PM 8/9/96 -0400, bivanovi@golden.net wrote:
> 
> >I have two things that I don't like about the 701 running win95, does anyone
> >else have the same problem, or solutions?
> >
> >1.  Adjusting the volume with FN PgUp / PgDn sometimes makes the pointer
> >    disappear.  This didn't happen in 3.1.
> 
>         Happens here too on mine.  If I push the stick  all the way to
> bottom & then back up, I usually get my pointer back.

The C&T 65545 video chipset in the 701 has a "hardware mouse pointer"
feature.  Basically, this means instead of the OS having to draw the
mouse pointer on the screen, the OS just gives a bitmap of the pointer
to the hardware and pointer position, and the hardware draws it before
every video refresh. It's most noticeable if you put the pointer over
a scrolling window.  If it's hardware-based, it will not flicker.  If
it isn't hardware-based, it will flicker (badly).

IBM apparently used this feature on the 701 to make the battery/
volume/contrast/etc. status displays show up on-screen.  The result is
that if the OS uses the hardware mouse feature, the pointer bitmap is
temporarily replaced by the status display.  It goes back to normal if
you do anything that changes the mouse pointer (pointer bitmap gets
replaced again).

The problem also shows up under Linux with the AcceleratedX drivers,
which uses the hardware mouse feature.  Win95 might have some settings
that let you modify whether this feature is used.  Try the mouse and
video settings.  It might be affected by the video hardware
acceleration slider bar.  That will fix the "problem," but your
pointer will flicker whenever the background is redrawn.

>>Also, I have 8MB RAM, how much of an improvement is there, going to 16 or 24?
> 
>         With Win '95?  I'd say enormous.  I bought an extra 8 MB when I got
> my 701 and never regretted it.  Win '95 uses a *lot* memory.  Prices are so
> cheap now, I'd recommend you go strait to a full 24 MB.  Even then, on my
> machine at least, it seems barely enough (I load up lots of cutesy stuff
> with Win '95 like Norton tools).

I run Win95 occasionally with 24 MB.  The extra memory does help, but
Win95's default swapfile management is inane (16MB free on swap
partition).  I'd be doing nothing in particular when Win95 suddenly
decided it should reduce the swapfile size.  The resulting disk
activity pretty much ground everything to a halt for 5-30 sec.
The extra memory seems to reduce how often the swapfile grows, but
not how much.  Worse yet, it would often run out of swapspace and
crash.  Eventually I got fed up and fixed the swapfile size at 8MB.
It still crashes, but not as often.
--
John H. Kim       "I stop for red traffic lights" -- bumper sticker 
jokim@mit.edu     commissioned by the City of Boston as part of a
MIT Sea Grant     campaign to shed its reputation for bad drivers.