Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!unido!gmdzi!strobl From: strobl@gmdzi.gmd.de (Wolfgang Strobl) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Mac Vs. Windows? (sorry) Message-ID: <4799@gmdzi.gmd.de> Date: 28 May 91 18:29:31 GMT References: <674648116.0@blkcat.FidoNet> Organization: GMD, St. Augustin, F.R. Germany Lines: 29 Charlie.Mingo@p4218.f421.n109.z1.FidoNet.Org (Charlie Mingo) writes: >mariusk@Lise.Unit.NO (Marius Kjeldahl) writes: >MK> 1. Usually RAM is faster than ROM, thats why they incorporate things like >MK> shadowram and so on. > RAM may be slightly faster than ROM in the MS-DOS world, but on Macs the >opposite is true. ... How that? What kind of ROMs are used in Macs? > ... Also, the comparison of ROM to RAM is a bit off, as with RAM >the code has to be loaded from disk in the first place. If you had gobs of RAM >to spare, you could just preload the whole thing at boot-time, but the ROM on my >Mac IIci is 512K, which would consume most of MS-DOS's 640K address space. If >you don't preload, then ROM is thousands of times faster than any disk access. True, but irrelevant. Windows uses the protected mode and is able to load and run code everywhere in the 16M address space of the 80286+ processors. Parts of the system are loaded into RAM during Windows startup, others are loaded only on demand. This occurs only once, if the machine has enough RAM. So the difference we are talking about here is the time to read 512K Bytes once - takes half a second, on my machine. No big deal. Wolfgang Strobl #include