🚀 go-pugleaf

slc@a2.cim.cdc.com (Steve Chesney x4662) writes:

>At my wife's job (a church) she is obligated to use a vintage IBM XT with
>a 10 meg hard disk, color display and IBM PC-DOS 2.10.  
>Since she is used to our 386, it seems slow to her.  Are there any cheap and
>simple upgrades that we could try to alleviate this?  I am considering:

>upgrade to MS-DOS 5.0
>use of a console driver like NANSI
>use of a disk cache
>optimize the disk (with something PC TOols Optimize)
>check disk interleave and adjust (with SpinRite or PC Tools DiskFix)

No matter what you do, it'll still be an XT. Depending on how much memory it
has, (I'm guessing not any more than a meg maximum) and how much memory the
programs use, you may or may not have much success at the disk cache and other
memory type solutions. I tried all of this on an old XT turbo that I was
"blessed" with and it didn't seem to make that much of a difference. Either
way, it still will never come close to comparing to the relatively blinding
speed of a 386. But you work with what you got, so good luck.

p.s. Remember when we got so excited about the intoduction of the 386. I'm just
waiting until Cray comes out with a desktop model. :)

-- 
| Joe Gross          | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| pickaxe@uiuc.edu   | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign        |
| (217) 328-4331     | "I've given up trying to stay ahead of the times, |
| NeXTmail welcome   | it's now a matter of how far I get left behind."  |