Upgrade Your PC For Free!! by Keith Law

from BAEC Newsletter No. 128 June 1998

Tips to make Windows 95 go faster and better....

Make sure you de-fragment your hard drive regularly. You will be amazed how much difference it actually does make, by regularly I mean about once a week.

Make a permanent swapfile. This is easy to do, but as default win95 will take over and use all you available hard drive space.

Defrag your hard drive first then click CONTROL PANEL, then SYSTEM, then PERFORMANCE, then VIRTUAL MEMORY, finally click on "LET ME SPECIFY MY OWN VIRTUAL MEMORY SETTINGS". Then enter the SAME number for minimum AND maximum, eg. if you have 16 Meg RAM then enter 32 for minimum and 32 for maximum, whatever memory you have, just enter double the amount for min and max settings.

Swap file access times can be speeded up by increasing buffers. In the system.ini, (may be a good idea to back it up first!) find the [386Enhl section, then change "PageBuffers=4" to "PageBuffers=32". If this line isn't in there... type it in and save it. We have seen very large improvements with this tip alone.

In the BIOS.
Enable the IDE HDD block mode in the BIOS. In AMI Bios change to the multiple sector setting, found in the hard disks menu.
This can give up to 10% extra performance. It allows the computer to transfer the maximum amount of data at once.
WARNING ! To avoid possible problems make sure your board has the 16550A interface. Typing MSD at the DOS prompt will give you this information.

Make sure the CPU internal cache and external cache is enabled in the BIOS.

Make sure the boot up system speed is set to fast. This sets the speed the system will run at AFTER power up.

Make sure the video BIOS is enabled. It will increase video speed.

Make sure the video BIOS cacheable is enabled. It will speed up VGA performance.

Enable the quick power on self tests to shorten or skip some of the power up tests. In an AMI bios, disable the "above lmb test" this will speed up the startup process.