On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 4:41 PM Liam Proven <lpro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Installing a CPU upgrade in an old PC was rarely worth the hassle, but > if you replaced a small hard disk (especially if compressed with > DoubleSpace or something) with a big more modern one, and maxed out > the RAM, the performance improvement was often very gratifying for a > relatively small spend. As a general rule, consumer machines are I/O bound, not compute bound. The CPU spends most of its time in an idle loop waiting for stuff to be read from/written to disk. More RAM is one speedup - it allows the OS to do a better jo9b of caching disk access. A faster disk is another. On my old XT clone, I had a replacement 10mhz motherboard with a NEC v20 CPU. The V20 was compatible with the Intel 8088, but had better microcode, for a cheap 5% speedup. It had 640K RAM and two Seagate ST-225 MFM HDs. I got it an AST- 6Pak K addon card that added another megabyte of RAM. AST software let me make 512MB of the RAM a RAMdisk, 256K a dick cache, and he oter 256K could be EMS for apps that could use it. (I made the RAMdisk first in my PATH, and put frequently used apps like LIST there, and set TEMP and TMP to point to it so things that honored that would use the RAMdisk for temp files. It sped up Zipping stuff a treat. A freeware utility could map unused video RAM to DOS. I used a Hercules video card, so 64K were available to be mapped to DOS, and the machine booted reporting 704K DOS RAM. Performance was acceptable, thank you. The current desktop uses a quad core Intel i5 CPU and 3.5 ghz, with an automatic turbo mode to 3.9 ghz. It has 20GB RAM, and boots and runs from a 256B PAnasonic SSD. Performance is lovely. There are faster machine out there, but since I'm not doing things like heavy video editing or compiling a large application from a source tree, it's moare tyhan adequate for what I do. > Liam Proven ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
