🚀 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

Using anything past DOS 3.31 on an XT is just a waste of RAM. There's
nothing that DOS 5 can do on an XT that DOS 3.31 can't. And 3.31 uses
*noticeably* less RAM.

>use of a disk cache

Without an EMS board there's nowhere to *put* the cache except in 
the 640k that everything else is trying to use. So you'd increase the
performance at the cost of breaking any RAM hungry software!

>Any other ideas? 

Shop around for an old EMS board. There are a lot of 8-bit only ones that
won't run at anything above 8 MHz bus speed. They're often available for
under $20 (without ram, but then the 256k chips (or even 64k!!) thery use
are *very* cheap)

Adding one will give a place for many programs to swap to, and allow you
to have things like a cache. The swapping will make a *major* performance
difference to any program that can use the EMS!

-- 
Leonard Erickson		      leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com
CIS: [70465,203]			 70465.203@compuserve.com
FIDO:   1:105/51	 Leonard.Erickson@f51.n105.z1.fidonet.org
(The CIS & Fido addresses are preferred)