Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!well!alcmist
From: alcmist@well.sf.ca.us (Frederick Wamsley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: PC HyperCard clones
Summary: Toolbook performance, and tuning thereof
Message-ID: <20251@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 13 Sep 90 05:47:35 GMT
References: <4581@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 27

In article <4581@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu> hmarvel@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Howard P. Marvel) writes:
>I got to try ToolBook yesterday running on a 33mhz PC.  It was not
>optimized as per the ToolBook manual, but I was not supposed to fool
>with CONFIG.SYS on the machine.  ToolBook suggests FILES=40,
>BUFFERS=40, and my settings appeared to be BUFFERS=10, FILES=30.  With
>this caveat, the performance was simply atrocious.  Has anyone had
>experience with running ToolBook with varying settings for these
>parameters?

Toolbook can be pretty disk-intensive so you should see a real improvement
from anything that speeds up disk access.  The single most important variable
is the amount of RAM available to Windows.  If it's less than 1M performance
will be atrocious indeed.  From 1M to 1.5M it's still slow.  By 2M or so it's
leveled off.

The first thing to try, though, is switching Toolbook from color to 
black&white (which incidentally makes it more comparable to Hypercard).
Setting startupSysColors=false in the Toolbook section of WIN.INI (the
Windows 3.0 configuration file) will give you large and unmistakable
speedups.  This will reduce the memory demands too.

(Should this move to comp.windows.ms?  I'm not sure I should be talking
about my employer's product in comp.sys.mac.hypercard).
-- 
Fred Wamsley  {ucbvax,pacbell,apple,hplabs}!well!alcmist;
CIS 72247,3130; GEnie FKWAMSLEY; USPS - why bother?
"There's a perfectly logical explanation for all this"