Downgrade is an Upgrade !.
-or-
How to upgrade without money !.
History is repeating . Here is a brief summary throughout this decade :
- Although I work with IBC PC's from '87 , lets go back to ’92 . I was using
the 'revolutionary' Win 3.1 for 1-2 years and then the
brand new Win 3.11 for Workgroups came to our lives . It was installed by most
users since (as it was announced) it was «more» 32-bit , faster , etc .
However very few observed any better performance . On the contrary Win 3.11 FW
was running less speedy in PC's with low specifications (as my 486/33 4MB was) .
- After some years , as I was doing most of my tasks pretty well on my
486/100 16MB , the full promising Windows 95 revealed . Yes, at last : a brand
new OS with a lot of improvements . I admit that Win95 was a revolution but the
performance of my PC was decreased a lot . I was waiting minutes in order to
start & edit a text in my Word 6.0 !!.
- So history is repeating !. Then I had a Pentium/166 32MB and I was happy
only at the beginning because most applications was becoming more «heavier».
Some years later I upgraded my PC to Pentium/233 MMX 64MB but Win98 came up !.
- The final step to start wondering what’s happening was the release of
WinME . It is still a Win 9x (has nothing to do with the Win 2K kernel ) however
you need double RAM to make same things same fast . Internet Explorer 5.5 & Windows Media 7.0 is a
disaster even for my AMD K6-2/366 - 196MB RAM !.
God .... there is no peace in this bloody computer world . So I decided to
choose what I need and what NOT . The result of my experience was brilliant . So
here are some guides to make your life faster with your existing PC , whatever
is it.
Guides: How to be faster without buying anything !
A. Choosing your applications .
- MS Office 95 is lighter & faster than MS Office 2K . Feels OK in
systems with 24-32MB RAM . Word 95 searches for a word through all your documents
or makes a check spell 3 times faster than Word 2K ! (measured on a P/233 MMX
64MB Ram) . Also Excel 95 makes most
calculations 3 times faster than Excel 2000 . Moreover supports your older favourite Win 3.x
Truetype Fonts (Word 2K does NOT) .
Yes I know , It sounds weird . The main thing I had to loose is the
Internet & HTML capabilities but that's why the FrontPage 2K is for . On my
main PC I have a full MS Office 95 installation plus FrontPage 2K .
All the rest PC’s I use have just the standard MS Office 95 installation .
However note that you have to work with the same version that all your
collaborators work . If you also work with Access , ODBC or other database
components , stay to your preferred MS Office version since there are many
differences from version to version .
- WinFax 8 (or later) was a nightmare for my P/166. It was taking 40% of my
CPU just for sitting on my tray !. Not even to mention what was
happening when it was start working . I also installed it for curiosity later
on my P/233 96MB Ram and it was still a nightmare . Now I choose SuperVoice
(v.2.2j) if I want Voice/Fax/Data capabilities (comes free with any
Ellite Group motherboard but can be
easily found ) , or MightyFax if I want only Fax management . Ironically
using SuperVoice 2.2 , I set up a voice answering system much more easier & faster than WinFax .
MightyFax is a 2MB robust application , no previous modem setup
needed , never stacked or crashed my PC or even lost a connection when was busy
. RingCentral 4.x comes free with the newer Supra modems and is looking
good & robust . Fax Mail Network 32-bit works OK even on a 486 as a fax
server . There are many other light fax applications , but I got satisfied with these ones .
- MS Outlook 97 (and later) was a disaster for my PII/266 32MB Laptop . Now I
use Time & Chaos . Read the ref.
article for more .
- If you are a serious surfer , you will find IE 5.5 unstable, buggy &
slow . The most popular alternative, Netscape is more unstable, more buggy and
more slow !. Many people upgraded their PC only for making IE surfing faster . Opera
(as I describe in another page) is a light fast
browser with strong keyboard navigation control . In a 3MB installation file there
you get a fast browser , email client , on-line news reader & ICQ client .
- Firewall programs seems to be simple & innocent applications but they
are not : BlackIce Defender - the simplest of all firewalls - reserves 15-20% of
my CPU (K6-2/366) even when I am not connected to Internet . Norton products are
not CPU hungry but runs slow when I want to configure or monitor them . My
choice is AT Guard . Read the ref.
article for more .
- Email tasks are done a lot faster if you use the email capabilities of
Opera . Switching from browsing to email - loading your email client for first
time - is done during 1/3 sec. in my PC (AMD K6-2/366 - 64MB Ram) as opposed to 7-9 sec. needed for
Outlook Express . If you want to achieve 1/3 sec. using standard WinME (IE / Outlook
Express) you definitely need a LOT more than a PIII/1000 - 256MB Ram . However note that
Opera's email client have fewer capabilities (no off-line newsgroup client
, no multiple character set (coding) view etc.) .
- Usenet (Newsgroups) discussions is one of my favourites tasks . If someone
works with Outlook Express 5.0 or greater he will suppose that this is a job
that must be done at least on a PII/450 64MB Ram. Wrong!. Some excellent small fast
offline Newsgroup readers are Xnews (free) , Free Agent (free) , Forte Agent
(share) . Free/Forte Agent includes also email client . My choice is Xnews: it's
free , supports multiple servers , it's real multi-thread , have many keyboard
shortcuts and the recent versions supports the newest encoding algorithm "yEnc"
. It manipulates my Usenet database fast even on a P/200 . I was using Xnews
for some years on a
486/100 . Besides all of the above applications were still popular from the age of Win 3.11 , far
before MSIE even created ! (MS included an offline news reader only after MSIE
4.0) . You can all find them on a TuCows
mirror .
- Moreover if you installed WinME you face more headaches: Internet Explorer
5.5 surf a lot more slower than 5.0 . Windows Media Player (WMP) 7.0 could not play OK
an mp3 (all visualizations off) in the same CPU where WMP 6.4 needed 40% CPU resources and WinAmp
2.6x needed 25% CPU
resources . If you still want to have a
WinME installation you can still use Opera for surfing & WinAmp for playing
.
- If you own a PIII 500-800 MHZ and you can't play DivX files OK check my Video
page before you upgrade . There are many alternatives better than this
bloody WMP 7.0 !.
- From all of the above mentioned is needles to say that you must prefer
better Win98 SE than WinME . There are thousands conversations of angry
users reporting that WinME is responsible for dramatically slow performance ,
stacks & hang-ups , incomplete installations , no good co-operation with
drivers & devices , network traffic etc . Moreover if you know what
exactly you want to install , prefer even a smaller Win version . I use a Win95B version in my
office . I admit that it faces some rare stacks when access a network but all my HD contents weights up to 200 MB .
- Sometimes you think that you need an upgrade but your PC just wants a good format
!. Backup applications (such as Symantec Ghost) saves you a lot of time
(actually days) when you think that your system is "tired" and you
must restore to where you 've been 6 months before or more .
- You have a small office and you want to install a small dedicated server but
you don’t know what to chose between Linux - FreeBSD - WinNT Server - Win 2K
Server - Unix etc . The solution I use is the old-time-classic Novell 3.x . From 1993 I was using it on a 486/66
4MB Ram PC, having a 6-user / 2 printer server LAN and never asked me for more ,
never stacked , never crashed . None else could «survive» in so low specs .
Today I still use it under a Celeron/400 - 16MB because Novel 5 or WinNT is
"too much" for such a system , and everything else need so much time
to be educated . Novell 3.x is far easier than Linux or
FreeBSD to set it up if you don't have any knowledge . I have to admit that a
Win9x/WinNT server is much more easier to set up . Can't say that it's faster than a Win9x / WinNT server but I can say
for sure that you can sleep at nights quietly . There is also a patch for
handling long filenames . I know that it looks too obsolete but if you don’t want
Internet capabilities from this server you are never going to be dissatisfied .
(Your LAN can have Internet but not this specific server. You can share internet
account and have all similar stuff via a hardware / software router or using another PC
as a proxy server) .
B. Setting up your environment .
- There are many tools & tips to gain (or re-gain) performance .
The list below refers to old PC's ( 486 - PII ) with Win9x installation .
0. (Only for experts) . Hardware utilization .
- Latest drivers are in most cases the bests drivers !. If you have
some more time feel free to update the drivers for crucial peripherals like your
Graphics card , Motherboard & Soundcard , but don't overdo it !.
- Be sure your enable the right Bus Master Drivers , DMA and all similar stuff .
- Some Bios tweaking might help . ( lower CAS latency & Memory timings,
disable shadow mem., L2 cache check, Spread Spectrum, etc) .
- Overclocking is good but it's a big word !. Test it extensively before you are sure that it
works OK .
1. Control the automatic loading of several files (at start-up).
- Inspect which programs are running in the background . TaskInfo
is an excellent utility reporting which applications are loaded and how much
CPU & Ram they conserve . You can test if a program is necessary by
trying to terminate it . When you are sure which programs you don't wish to
be loaded follow the next steps:
- Some "co-operative" programs can be disabled by just setting up
it's options , otherwise...
- Go to : Start -> Programs -> StartUp : If you want to avoid
loading some files , just move them to another folder .
- Go to : Start -> Run... -> msconfig [Enter] -> Startup : Control
which files to be loaded at start up by checking or unchecking them . You can also use TweakAll
utility if your Win version does not include msconfig .
- Finally there is an extreme case that the program is loaded from a line in
your system.ini file .
- Some free (AdWare) programs load utilities when start-up in order to
download advertising
content from the Web . Lavasoft's Ad-aware
is a freeware utility that sniffs the existence of suspicious files . Just
for the history OptOut
from www.grc.com was the
first one but now is discontinued .
2. Use some tools like:
- Cacheman (free)
. Set up various cache size settings . This is a MUST-Have !.
- Freemem
(free) . Maximizes your free available memory, mostly for 48 - 128MB Ram PC's .
- EasyMTU (free)
. This kind of programs set up TCP/IP parameters for best Internet speed .
You can also use TweakAll
for that .
Motive: "I have a fast PC. Why do I have to learn all these ?."
1) Did you notice that your PC behaves like the one you had 3 years
before ? !! .
2) Many times you have to work with systems you do not own or you cannot change
(Office PC, Laptop etc) .
3) If you want to buy a 2nd PC for some specific tasks , now you know that you
probably want a PC that most people want to get rid of !.
4) "Heavy" applications in most cases will become heavier
... Most light applications build with the philosophy to be simple & fast
, remain so throughout their releases . Example: I'm sure that MSIE 6.0
will be slower than 5.5 but I bet that Opera 6.0 will not have significant difference
than 5.0 .
5) The fact that you are fast enough does not overcome the need to be faster !.
6) "Light is Health" ... Don't you know that ? .
P.S. At this time I own a pretty fast PC ( Celeron / 1GHZ - 650MB Ram) . With such PC you cannot tell a difference between today's heavy
& light applications . However none of my habits changed because all the
above mentioned reasons are still valid even in my new PC .
That’s it guys .
"It’s up to you to decide if you want to be FASTER!."
Michael Hondrosmos
27/01/2001
