Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think!ames!uhccux!tholen
From: tholen@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (David Tholen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2
Subject: screen blanker; HPFS
Keywords: OS/2
Message-ID: <5730@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 15 Dec 89 01:34:15 GMT
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 34

I have two screen blankers, one automatic, one manual.  I got the automatic
one from some anonymous ftp site (sorry!  I don't have that documentation
with me, and I don't remember which one).  The filename is SCRNBLNK.ARC.  It
allows you to set the length of time it waits for keyboard inactivity
before blanking the screen; or you could optionally have a clock in a box
jumping around on the screen every few seconds.  And, of course, you could
run the program a second time to remove it.  I don't use it much because of
what I consider to be a bug.  I had it set to blank the screen after two
minutes of inactivity.  While doing an XCOPY operation to floppy, my keyboard
was indeed inactive for two minutes, so SCRNBLNK went into action, blanking
the screen, AND STOPPING THE XCOPY OPERATION DEAD IN ITS TRACKS.  As soon as
I hit a key, XCOPY came back to life.  Not terribly useful if your job stops
simply because the keyboard wasn't touched.  Haven't tried it with XCOPY in
the background; I presume it would keep running under those circumstances
(heaven forbid that all background jobs get stopped by the screen blanker!).

The manual one I wrote myself before I came across the automatic one.  It's
just a simple call to VioScrollUp; waits for a return before exiting.  The
only problem is that if the command line prompt isn't at the bottom of the
screen, the cursor is gone.  Haven't invested the time to figure out why.  If
I know I'm going to be away from the keyboard for awhile, I simply type
BLANK at a full screen command prompt.

A while back I posted a query about possible redundancy between the BUFFERS=
and DISKCACHE memory eaters and the CACHE associated with the HPFS.  Due to
the overwhelming silence, I can only assume that either the question was so
incredibly stupid that nobody could dignify it with a response, or that
everybody else out there is just as uncertain as I am.  Somehow I doubt the
former possibility.  Haven't run across any help from the on-line or printed
documentation.  How about somebody from Microsoft/IBM commenting on this?
With HPFS, can one eliminate the DISKCACHE statement from the CONFIG.SYS file
without adversely affecting disk performance?

--Dave Tholen          tholen@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu