Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hplsla!davidr
From: davidr@hplsla.HP.COM (David M. Reed)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: DESQview 386 Question
Message-ID: <470005@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 7 Aug 89 18:03:13 GMT
References: <1681@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 29

If you use a question mark "?" as the last character in the Program Parameters
field, DESQview will prompt the user for information before starting the
application.  This way you, for example, when DESQview starts your editor
it will allow you to enter the name of the file you want to edit.

As for memory allocation.  If your program really DEMANDS more than 550K of
conventional memory you will probably never be able to run it under DESQview.

As for disc access.  I do not know the answer, but I have some ideas as to
why such poor performance.  I suspect that for optimum disc performance under
DESQview you will want to have your disc interleave set at 2 (or 3), unless
you have really good buffering or cache (such as on the hard disc
controller).  Since DESQview is giving time slices to programs (either
foreground or background), then a process that is reading from disc is
not really able to read continuously (particularly if it is doing its own
disc accessing instead of utilizing DOS or the BIOS), and therefore would
need to "go around again" to get what it was interrupted at doing the
"first time around".

Now one must realize that any program running in a multi-tasking environment
will NOT run as fast as it would in a single-tasking environment.  There will
be some performance penalty.  It is not as noticeable on a interactive
program (like an editor) as on something like a program accessing a disc.
But I generally care very little if something that used to take 5 minutes
now takes 6 (or 7 or 10) if I can be doing something else at the same time.
Yes, I still get caught up in the idea of wanting programs to run faster, but
that, I began to realize, was because I did not like to wait.  If I can be
doing something else instead of simply waiting, then speed is not quite so
critical to me.