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From: c60b-1eq@e260-1c.berkeley.edu (Noam Mendelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Command.com in ramdisk
Message-ID: <1991Apr14.014839.578@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 14 Apr 91 01:48:39 GMT
References: <1991Apr12.192526.23566@rodan.acs.syr.edu>
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In article <1991Apr12.192526.23566@rodan.acs.syr.edu> ldstern@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Larry Stern) writes:
>To all: I've been told that creating a drive D with ramdrive.sys and loading
>command.com there (ie. setting comspec=d:\command.com) will increase overall
>performance and speed. Any comments? 
>P.S. I use a 286 AT clone, 640K base and 384K extended memory.

Yes, it should increase overall performance in two respects:
	(a) when you shell to DOS (another copy of COMMAND.COM has to be
	    loaded);
	(b) when you're executing COMMAND.COM's intrinsic commands.

Situation (b) is less common but it does exist since COMMAND.COM only
loads about 5K of itself into low memory and accesses the original
COMMAND.COM when necessary.
So, to answer your question, yes it does.  But I'm sure that you could
find better ways of utilizing a 384k RAM disk.  Putting COMMAND.COM there
is just a generic way of improving performance.
You might consider setting some of your programs' 'temporary directories'
to the RAM disk (provided you have enough room).  That is a much better
way to improve a program's performance.
One other alternative is an extended memory disk cache.  That will improve
overall performance, but it may require you to surrender some of your
conventional memory.

-- 
+==========================================================================+
| Noam Mendelson   ..!agate!ucbvax!web!c60b-1eq | "I haven't lost my mind, |
| c60b-1eq@web.Berkeley.EDU                     |  it's backed up on tape  |
| University of California at Berkeley          |  somewhere."             |