🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <sheldon.713715436@pv141b.vincent.iastate.edu> sheldon@iastate.edu (Steve Sheldon) writes:
>
>>1) Buy new vga/svga cards/monitors for them - how much faster would
>>   this make them?
>
> I take it you mean that the monochrome monitors are Herc TTL?
>I have a Everex mono VGA, with a Trident 8900 card, and it works fine.
>You're talking about $150 for VGA card(256K does fine), and mono
>VGA monitors.
>  This would probably give you a better display.  I don't know if
>performance would increase.


Nope.  To be honest, if you have a newer monochrome adapter (the ones that
use VVLSI instead of TTL), Windows video is just about as fast as you can
make it.  The older (including the original) Herc cards are slower because
of the technology/memory/circuitry used in the cards--but even so, herc
cards are usually more than four times faster.  Why, you ask?  Simple:
Monochrome graphics cards only have to move 720x320 pixels that have only
two states: on or off.   A VGA card has to do 640x480x16, an SVGA has to 
do 640x480x256, 800x600x16 (or 256), or 1024x768x16 (or 256)--there is
much much more junk to shove across the bus.  SVGA is probably the slowest
of the slow: in order to fit the 256K, 512K, or one Meg of video RAM into
a mappable area, SVGA's employ a rather elaborate planing scheme (mappable
pages) which also add to speed deficiency.

The problem with Monochrome graphics/Windows is that Windows tends to
try to "dither" colors to achieve a rudimentary greyscale... this cuts down
the overall resolution so that some Windows Apps cannot fit on the desktop
at all (I'm thinking about Corel Draw here).  Others work simply mahvelous
(Winword 2.0 and Excel 4.0)... but appear to be slow because the system
I'm running them on is slow.


>
>>2) Add lots of ram (would RAM + a Cache be a good way to go?)
>
> Bingo!  4 Megs minimum.  I have 5 Megs of RAM in my machine, and it
>is running faster than any DX machine I've seen with only 2 Megs of
>RAM under windows.

Hear Hear!  RAM is probably the best way to increase speed (next to
purchasing a 486/50, of course).   I've also found that Smartdrv.sys
with sufficient RAM also adds immensely to Windows efficiency.

> Better yet, scrap the Windows kludge.  The normal DOS applications work
>a hell of a lot faster, using less resources.


If GUI isn't necessary, this is a good alternative.  Using Word 5.5 versus
WordWin is always viable, using Quatro Pro instead of Excel 4.0 works well
too.  But if you need particular applications because you really NEED them,
a 386sx-16 should work just fine until you can afford to get something 
better.