Re: 701 and win95

[Randy Whittle <whittle@usc.edu>]

At 12:19 PM 8/11/96 -0400, John H. Kim wrote:
>The C&T 65545 video chipset in the 701 has a "hardware mouse pointer"

>IBM apparently used this feature on the 701 to make the battery/
>volume/contrast/etc. status displays show up on-screen.  The result is

        Actually, I'm glad they have this feature in the 701.  It makes it
*very* convenient to easily check the various status of things (sound,
brightness, battery, etc.).  On my 750C, if you didn't have the appropriate
driver(s) loaded or Win applet running, you couldn't check this stuff.  With
the 701, no extras are required--built-in to the hardware.

>>>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

        All I can say is that on mine--just with Win '95 and some stuff I
like Norton Navigator to load, it reports memory usage at nearly 20 MB.  It
has made some difference for me to go from 16 to 24 MB--Win 95 just plain
uses a *lot* of memory, if its available.  My desktop machine, with similar
loading of stuff as my 701, *really* showed a speed/disk activity break when
I went from 16 to 48 MB RAM in it--virtually zero swapfile activity (and it
shuts down almost instantly, whereas it took forever with just 16 MB of
RAM).  I'm sure I'd see even bigger improvement on my 701 just as I did my
desktop if only I could add more memory beyond the 24 MB limit.

>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.

        How do you tell its actually messing with the swapfile?  Just
whenever you have mysterious disk activity?

>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.

        You set a limit to how big the swapfile gets though.  Windows still
controls the size, but limited by what you set it at.  Have you tried that
and if so, does that help you any?

-------
Randy Whittle		rwhittle@usa.net
USC Graduate School of Business    http://www-scf.usc.edu/~whittle