Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!umich!sharkey!clmqt!steve From: steve@clmqt.marquette.Mi.US (Steve Lasich) Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms Subject: Re: Amount of Memory for 386SX Running Win3.0 (Windows Speedup) Message-ID: <1990Oct18.074254.4043@clmqt.marquette.Mi.US> Date: 18 Oct 90 07:42:54 GMT References: <90284.153201SLVQC@CUNYVM.BITNET> Lines: 41 SLVQC@CUNYVM (Salvatore Saieva) writes: > I was just helping a friend configure Win3.0 to run on his > Zenith 386SX. Boy, is it slooowww... The Zenith is running > at 16MHz and has 1MB of memory installed. I'd like to hear > from others running Win3.0 on an SX: how much memory do you > have installed and does Windows run at an acceptable speed. "Acceptable speed" is very subjective. Especially where Windows is concerned. Two megs of RAM makes Windows tolerable. Barely. What I found is that the Zenith COMPRESS utility did more to speed up Windows than I would have thought possible. I did a side-by-side comparison of Windows on a Zenith 386SX (16 MHz) and a Zenith 386/20MHz. Both machines had two megabytes of RAM and 40 meg hard disks and ran Windows in the enhanced 386 mode. The SX machine initially ran Windows apps two to three times faster than the 386/20! It was unbelieveable. What happened was I had reformatted the SX machine with DOS 4.0 for the test. Then I ran the Windows install. This is why Windows ran so quickly. It was the first and only thing on the disk. There was almost zero seek time from the FAT to C:\WINDOWS. The 386/20 already had about 25 megs of files on its disk when Windows 3.0 arrived. The Windows installation placed the new directories out in the middle of the hard disk. This made for a LOT of seek time. With all of Windows' disk-swapping, this seek time really added up. My COMPRESS came with Zenith-Microsoft DOS 3.3. It runs under DOS 4.0 but is not shipped with 4.0. The hard disk on my 386/20 was NOT fragmented. However, the COMPRESS utility reported "9 directories were relocated." The 386/20 Windows directories were shifted outward, nearer the FAT. After the optimization, the 386/20 machine ran Windows applications twice as fast as the SX machine. The optimized setup is OK for multi-tasking DOS applications, but with just two megabytes Toolbook just crawls. The drive light is on almost constantly. Your friend's mileage may vary, but a disk tune-up might rev up his/her machine. At least until the new memory comes.