Getting To Know

EARLY SPRING TUNE-UP: Ways to optimize your system

by Michael Furdyk

There is hardly a computer owner who is not interested in getting the best possible performance and use out of their system. It's just a mental condition that goes along with PC ownership. So, this section is an attempt to show you ways to increase the performance of your system by working with what you have now. These things involve changing settings of existing hardware and software in your computer.

But, I need to mention that many of these ideas involve making changes to the system that do affect other pieces of hardware. Problems could arise in trying them. So here is a small list of things you should do to cover yourself:

Back up your data. Don't shrug it off with "everyone says that". Do it! Make note of all changes you make and what the settings were before you messed with it. You may make changes to the BIOS. If problems arise, you may need to return it to the previous settings. Keep in mind the limits of your hardware. Don't go performance crazy and make big broad changes to the BIOS all at once. This just digs you a deep hole real fast and you won't have any idea how to get out.

Speeding up the Boot Process

If you use your computer a lot, you may grow impatient waiting for the system to boot up. You have all this work to do, and you have to sit there and wait for the thing! Well, there are ways to speed up the booting process. Here are a few tricks:

Disable Floppy Drive seek. When your computer turns on, the BIOS automatically accesses the Floppy Drive, regardless of whether there is a disk in it or not. Disabling this feature can speed up the booting by a couple seconds.
Enable Quickboot. Many newer machines come with a BIOS feature called Quickboot or Quick POST. Enabling this option makes the system bypass some of the normal tests it would do on boot up normally. It makes the process faster, but increases the chances of a hardware problem going undetected because the system doesn't catch it at the start.
Remove the Boot Delay. Some PCs have an option to delay the booting for a couple seconds. Mainly, this is done to give the hard drive a chance to get going before the BIOS needs it. You can try removing it to speed things up, but you may need it after all.
One last suggestion is to change the boot sequence in the BIOS. The default order is A:, C:. The computer always checks the floppy drive first for a diskette, then if none is present, it proceeds to boot off the hard drive. This can be a nuisance sometimes. You may have a diskette in there from another time, and when it find that, it gives you an error. Or even worse, you have a virus infected floppy in there, and when the system tries to boot off the diskette, the virus infects the boot sector of the hard drive. To avoid this, you may want to change the sequence to C:, A:.

Freeing Disk Space

You start out buying a brand new drive, and it seems so large that there aren't enough programs to fill it up! In a year's time, you'll be trying to find ways to save space.

It's a constant war to try to keep your hard drive space available, especially when you surf the 'Net regularly. Even if you don't add any software to the system, your hard drive space slowly dwindles away. Why?

In this section, some light will be shed on this issue, as well as give some tips to save space or recover lost space.

Run SCANDISK regularly, or another better program that does the same thing because SCANDISK certainly isn't the best. Regardless, scan your hard disk for errors often as part of preventive maintenance. This optimizes its operation and recovers lost space being held by lost data.
Defragment your drive at least once a month. You can use DEFRAG that comes with Windows, or another better third party option. Over time, files can get chopped up and spread all over the drive, causing your drive to have to look all over the place to operate. Defragmenting the drive, thus, increases performance, while recovering lost space.
Organize your files. This doesn't help performance or space, but it sure helps your mental state. Give directories names that make sense when installing them. Store your data files in a directory all their own. Remember, Windows 95/98 supports long file names. Take advantage of this so that things make sense.
Make sure you are using the FAT32 system if you have Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows 98. If you want, you can repartition your drive to take better advantage of the space available. With a smaller partition, you can use smaller clusters. Therefore, less space is wasted. This is easiest to do when the drive is new. If you want to repartition the drive with data on it, you will need a secondary program like Partition Magic to do it and keep your data intact.
Empty the Recycle Bin. When you delete a file under Windows 95, it doesn't really go away. It goes to the Recycle Bin. If you forget about this, you could have several megabytes of space wrapped up in files you thought were gone.
Disk Compression. It is generally recommended to stay clear of such things, but it is possible to compress your drive and get up to 2 times the amount of space out of it. However, compressing your drive increases the risk of data loss and lessens performance in your system.

Freeing Up Memory

There are a number of ways you can increase the amount of conventional memory available to you. Conventional memory is that first 640 KB of memory which all programs hog for. Since it is in such demand, keeping it optimized and available is important. Many of these actions involve making changes to the CONFIG.SYS file. Remember, you want to keep a backup of the last CONFIG.SYS that your system last worked correctly with. So, be sure to copy the file to CONFIG.BAK before modification.

Be sure to thin out your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files under Windows 95/98. Many times these files call up programs that are simply not needed or not there. These lines can be removed. Better yet, just add REM to the beginning of the line you want to take out. This makes it a "remark" and the computer will not execute that line.

Here are some things to try if you're not running MS-DOS only or Windows 3.x and MS-DOS:

Use the HIMEM.SYS file. At the top of CONFIG.SYS, add two lines: DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS and DOS=HIGH,UMB.

This will call up HIMEM.SYS, a program that loads DOS into high memory, or that first 64K of memory, that all DOS programs fight over.

Use EMM386.SYS. This program enables DOS to load drivers and other automatically loaded programs into the upper memory while conserving conventional memory. To use it, add the following to CONFIG.SYS right after the HIMEM.SYS line:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE. There are a couple parameters you should add to this line. To disable expanded memory, which hardly anybody needs, add NOEMS to disable the EMS buffer. To disable the Monochrome Video Area, add I=B000-B7FF. This disables the monochrome area that is used by the really old DOS programs that were monochrome. Today, with everything in color, this is just a waste of 32K of conventional memory.

With HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.SYS working, it gives you the ability to move drivers and programs that would usually reside in conventional memory up to the upper memory. To do this, you simply add HIGH to the lines loading up the drivers. For example, in the CONFIG.SYS file, a driver will be loaded by DEVICE=. To load this driver into upper memory, you call it up by DEVICEHIGH=. In AUTOEXEC.BAT, you can place a program in upper memory by adding LOADHIGH to the line that runs the program. Most drivers can be moved to upper memory, including CD-ROM, mouse, etc.

Taking this into account, a typical CONFIG.SYS may look something like this:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
I=B000-B7FF
DEVICEHIGH={System drivers and paths go here}
DOS=HIGH,UMB
FILES=100
BUFFERS=40
BREAK=ON
LASTDRIVE=Z

Operating System Performance

Of course there are ways to improve performance by playing with the hardware settings, but there are also ways of tweaking the Operating System. The OS is very tightly knitted with the hardware's performance. Tweaking it really helps.

This part of System Optimization is based on Windows 95. Some may complain, but this OS is simply the most common.

The biggest drawback on performance that has to do with the OS is virtual memory. This is where the OS writes to the hard drive when it has run out of space in the RAM. When running many programs or large programs, the system makes use of this virtual memory, and performance lags. It causes frequent read/write actions and head movements. These head movements, or seek time, is the slowest feature of the hard drive. When storing this temporary information to the hard drive, it puts it in a swap file. This file gets larger as Windows 95 needs more room, and smaller as it needs less. Adjusting the characteristics of the swap file can benefit performance. You can mess with the swap file settings in the Control Panel. Click on System, then the Performance tab. Under Advanced Settings, click Virtual Memory. Here you can set the minimum and maximum size of the swap file as well as its location. If you set the minimum and maximum sizes to be the same, it tells Windows that it can't resize the file. If they are different, it can resize the file within the limits. The default value is to let Windows do it all, with a 0 min and no max.

When done, hit OK.

Do not set the swap file size to be too low. If you do, you may get out of memory problems later. And definitely do not disable the use of a swap file.

The automatic resizing feature of the swap file under Windows 95 is good for conserving disk space, but not good for performance. Using Virtual Memory at all reduces performance, but its even worse when the drive is continually resizing the file. So, if you have plenty of disk space to spare, give the swap file a set size. In the virtual memory settings window, set the min and max files to be the same. This will eliminate resizing.

The size to set it to is sort of a judgment call. It sort of depends on the kind of work you use your system for. The typical value is around 50 MB. If you run into problems, you may want to increase it.
Another method of improving performance is to optimize the position of the swap file on the hard disk. Placing it near the front of the drive ensures that the read/write heads don't have to travel as far. This can be done by using a second hard drive for the swap file. This gets the read/write action off of the same drive as the OS and the major programs, and can increase performance. You can also make use of partitions to do this. You can set off a separate partition for the swap file. This treats it as its own drive and eliminates some problems. You can also create two partitions and put the swap file at the beginning of the second, thus putting the file at the center of the hard disk and minimizing the distance traveled by the heads. This partition method can be used on any files which one wants to increase performance on.

The Windows 95 use of disk cache can damper performance. Disk cache is what Windows 95 does with data from the hard drive. It places the most recently used data from the hard drive into whatever memory is not being used by programs. This serves as a sort of virtual disk. The intent is to increase performance by minimizing hard disk activity, but it doesn't always work that way. As activity increases, the system wants to use this disk cache. This wants more room on memory. Then, as the programs need more memory for operation, they have to go to virtual memory because disk cache has taken so much memory up. This leads to a weird situation where the disk performance increases, but performance decreases anyway due to the use of virtual memory.

The way around this is to limit the amount of space the OS is allowed to use for disk cache. You can choose whatever amount you want taking into consideration how much memory you have. If you have 32 MB of RAM, a 4 MB limit should be fine.

Unlike adjusting the swap file size, playing with the disk cache size is not easy. It involves editing the SYSTEM.INI file in a text editor. Once you are in the file, find the line that contains "vcache".

Right below this line, insert MinFileCache=x and MaxFileCache=x as separate lines. Replace "x" with the value of min and max in KB. Keep in mind that 1 KB is actually 1024 bytes. So, in the above 32 MB of memory example, you could insert MinFileCache=4096 and MaxFileCache=4096 to limit the disk cache size to 4 MB. Like all changes to Windows, you will have to reboot for the changes to take effect.

Automatic virus scanning software can really decrease performance. Such programs are always scanning every file as you open it for viruses. This continual scanning is a drain on the system. A good virus scanner is recommended, but not one that is checking files continually.

A few more notes. When you upgrade hardware and install the drivers, always remove the drivers of the old hardware if you remove it. A system, over time, can become crammed with drivers, many outdated, and this just serves to decrease performance. You can see what hardware and drivers are installed on your system by clicking on System in the Control Panel. Then click the Device Manager tab. You are given a list of installed hardware. If you see devices that are no longer on the system, you should delete them. Be positive they are no longer in use before performing this step.

Also, get a good installer program. Over time, after cycling through many different programs on your system and since deleting them, the system can become clogged with traces of the old software. Manually deleting some programs is fine, but other dig themselves into the OS and if you delete them, there are still traces.

All Windows programs create entries in the Windows registry and these entries are often still there after the program is long gone. This can lead to a long registry file and it bogs performance.

Many good programs exist that uninstall old software and are quite good at removing every trace. Many programs come equipped with their own uninstalling program. Still other programs are designed to clean out Windows registry. Most of the tweaks on this page are relatively harmless and have the possibility of speeding up your system while decreasing hard drive activity. As always, though, it's a good idea to back up your system before trying any of the above tips.

Performance Tweaking

There are a number of BIOS settings in your system which affect the overall performance of the machine. When these are tweaked correctly, performance can increase quite a bit.

Set Optimal Bus speed settings. This point appears first because it's most important. The bus speed of the system directly affects how fast it is because it affects the communication lines between the parts. The processor speed relies on the bus speed. Processor speed is the result of the bus speed times the multiplier. A multiplier is the number of times faster the processor is than the bus. You want to use the fastest bus speed supported by your motherboard. In order to do this, you may need to lower the multiplier to relate to the CPU speed. This is controlled by jumper settings on the motherboard, or in SoftMenu if your board is jumperless. More on this subject in Overclocking.

Enable the internal cache. Processors have their own internal cache which operates at the processor's speed. The newer chips have larger caches. Always have this cache enabled. This is controlled in the BIOS. It helps performance quite a bit. If you can't enable it without problems, it is a sign of a definite hardware problem.

Enable External Cache. This cache sits on the motherboard and lies between the RAM and the processor. Some comes on a small card that fits into a short little slot, but most newer motherboards have the cache built on. Some have 256 KB, others 512 KB or higher. Make sure this is enabled.

Enable Fast A20 Gating. This is a confusing subject I don't feel like talking about, but enable it for a small performance boost.

Enable Global Chipset Features. Enable this BIOS setting for faster performance. Not all chipsets even have it, so its no big deal. Make sure all the RAM that can be cached is being cached. Most chipsets have the capability to cache up to 64 MB of RAM. Some chipsets, like the 430HX, can cache more. In any case, enable this option to cache whatever it can. If this is a problem, there may be a memory or motherboard problem.

Tweak the Memory Timing. Most BIOS provide an option to set the timing, or speed, of the memory in the system. Setting this as fast as possible can aid performance. Most BIOS do it automatically. Its best to avoid setting it too fast. Most typical RAM has a speed or 60 ns. Whatever yours is, set it to that.

Finally, if you have flash BIOS, get the latest BIOS version.

Freeing System Resources

Many people cram their PCs so full of gadgets that they find that they are simply out of room or have used all the resources available. Making optimal use of the resources makes a lot of sense.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use a PS/2 mouse instead of a serial mouse. A serial mouse is used through a serial port on the computer and uses a COM Port all to its own. In some cases, you may need to use the serial port for another device or you need the extra COM Port.

Also, a COM Port always uses one of two IRQs, and these IRQs are in the lower range of those on the PC. The lower range IRQs are the same ones that all of your add-in cards demand. Therefore, people often find that their serial mouse gets in the way.

A way around this is to use the PS/2 mouse. This type of mouse uses its own PS/2 port, a small 6-pin round connector. It also used IRQ 12, an IRQ that is not in heavy demand by any other component. Most newer PC's have PS/2 mouse support built in. Just look for the connector on the back of the case. If you don't see one, don't give up.
Some companies use motherboards that support it but did not include the port on the back of the case. To find out, check the manual. Or you can enter the setup program and see if there is a BIOS option for the PS/2 mouse. If there is, your board supports it and all you have to do is get a port, screw it on, connect it to the PS/2 connector on the motherboard, and load in the PS/2 drivers built right in to Windows 95.

In the rare case that you actually need IRQ 12, you can always revert back to the serial mouse.

IRQ2/IRQ9: Many are afraid to use IRQ 2 on their system because it is used by the system to connect to the higher IRQs, above 7. This leaves IRQ 3-7, which is in high demand by other parts. But, in fact, IRQ 2 can be used by a device.

The computer automatically reverts that device up to IRQ 9, out of range on potential IRQ conflicts. So, install that device on IRQ 2, then configure the software to look for IRQ 9.

Free Up Slots: It can happen. You have too many parts and not enough slots -- this can be a problem especially with the old ISA slots. With newer motherboards coming out, the number of ISA slots is decreasing in favor of the faster PCI slots. But, there are a few little things you can keep in mind that may free up a slot for you.

First, there is the option of a shared ISA slot. This slot can accept a PCI or an ISA device. So, if you need an ISA slot free for an ISA device, but have a PCI card in it, move the PCI card up to a PCI slot. Or vice versa if you are out of PCI slots and have a spare ISA slot.

In most cases one or two PCI slots are blocked off because their respective holes on the case are being used by the serial ports or printer ports. On AT systems, these ports are screwed onto the case and connected to the motherboard via a ribbon cable. But, if you look, the back of your case should have punch-out holes built in a little higher up on the case. If you punch these out and screw the ports in there, you free up the one or two PCI slots.

Finally, if you've upgraded from an old outdated card and its still there, get rid of it. It's not being used and it just takes up a slot.

IDE Channels: Most motherboards come with built in connectors and controllers for your IDE drives. Most come with two, for two drives. But, if you are only using one drive, then you can disable the other controller and free up the IRQ it uses. You can do this in the Integrated Peripherals part of the BIOS.

Similarly, if you are using SCSI drives and have no IDE, then you can disable all IDE controllers. If you want to, you can disable the IDE port on your sound card. You say "sound card?". Yes. Many sound cards come with IDE controllers for a CD-ROM drive to connect to. This controller can be set up on IRQ 11.

Disabling this can free up that IRQ. This is usually done by changing a jumper on the sound card.

System Disk

A good, valid system disk is invaluable in the event of an emergency. Taking a few minutes to create a good one is a good idea.

A system disk is diskette with Windows system files and necessary setup files. Its purpose is to be able to boot your system in the event that the hard drive fails to do so. It is also used to setup a hard drive. To create a good system disk, follow the steps here:

Find a blank floppy diskette and stick it in Drive A.
In Windows Explorer, right-click on A:, then choose format.
Click on full format, and check Copy System Files.
Click OK. It should start to format. Make sure the disk isn't write-protected. If it is, Windows will tell you.
When done, you will probably have COMMAND.COM, DRVSPACE.BIN, IO.SYS, and MSDOS.SYS on the disk. But you want more to make the disk truly useful.
Copy FDISK.EXE, FORMAT.COM, EDIT.COM, REGEDIT.EXE, UNINSTALL.EXE, SYS.COM, SCANDISK.INI, CHKDSK.EXE, and ATTRIB.EXE to the diskette.
Some of these files are not really necessary, but may be of help in certain situations. Also, adding MSCDEX.EXE and SBCD.SYS or some variants for your CD-ROM can be useful in case your hard drive fails, and you need these drivers to reinstall your Operating System from scratch on a new drive.

If there are any other files you think should be there, by all means, copy them over.

Remove the diskette from the drive.

Flip the write-protect latch over to keep this disk from being corrupted.

Test the disk by booting your system off of it.

Good Luck! *****

From computerjournal.com

Click here to return to list of articles