CompuServe Messages

Ian, << Pentium problems.. >> repost… "Hello All, Well, the good news is, my rendering time on the P5/90 has dropped from 90 minutes to 3 minutes! Follow these simple instructions to get the same out of your machine. Put your hand on the Pentium's ZIF socket, and say "I'll never buy a Power PC" three times. Poof! Instant performance increase, and this week's winning lotto numbers appear embedded in the BIOS serial number on your next boot. Serves me right for reading all those Mac and Toaster magazines when I should have been memorizing my device driver memory allocation tables. Here's what worked. CONFIG.SYS before loaded HIMEM, EMM386, SETVER, POWER, IFSHLP, DOS HIGH, DOS UMB, and CD-ROM drivers. CONFIG.SYS after loads HIMEM, EMM386, SETVER, DOS HIGH, DOS UMB. I also bumped FILES up to 100 and BUFFERS to 40. AUTOEXEC before loaded the NETWORK, CD-ROM, SMARTDRV, MOUSE, VMODE, and 3DS. AUTOEXEC after loads the MOUSE, NETWORK, VMODE, and 3DS. FYI, VMODE is for the Gateway monitor, and I moved the MOUSE driver before the network driver since it takes more memory. Also, I significantly reduced the amount of memory used by the network startup files by setting Lantastic's default parameters to realistic (I hope) minimums. Time will tell. Here's what didn't work. Setting FILES and BUFFERS too low added to rendering time. Disabling HIMEM and EMM386 didn't help, but it didn't hurt either. Removing the NOEMS parameter from EMM386 did slow rendering time (logically, Cap'n Kirk). Including the old DOS parameter FCBS added to rendering time. Playing with the BIOS setup didn't help. Gateway (or more properly, AMI) only lets one ENABLE or DISABLE cache memory, and as you can imagine, disabling it sends rendering time into the stratos"fear". The only other CMOS setup parameters deal with the speed of the ISA bus and IDE transfers. I didn't play with them. If anyone out there thinks disabling the shadow memory, slowing the ISA bus speed, or choosing a specific IDE transfer mode will help, drop me a line and I'll look under the hood again before I have to. Using all local materials instead of hitting materials off of a network server's hard drive did not improve rendering time. Running MEMMAKER after revising CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT didn't help. Blowing cayenne pepper into the vents in the front didn't help, but it made me feel better. I'm still a little worried about the whole deal, though. Trimming the fat from the network configuration cut rendering time to 21 minutes. Available memory=61688, Used memory=61688, Swap=128, and Page faults=188. I didn't write down the exact parameters for the 90 minute render, but Swap wasn't much more than 128 (maybe 500?). The current setup performs the same rendering task in 3 minutes, with 63736 available and 61864 used, 0 swap and 0 page faults. If 3DS could talk, I think it would be saying, "Hey Mac, you're 1872 steps away from the quicksand."