Will Honea wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:
 WH> Roy J. Tellason wrote to all on 04-15-1998
RT> I've gotten to the other cd this time,  the "bonus pack" 
RT> stuff.  No problems with installing it except for that 
RT> multimedia viewer package,  which seemed to want to insist 
RT> on installing to drive c:.
 WH> Assuming C: was where you installed OS/2 and you put the base 
 WH> multimedia stuff on C:, that's where it's gonna go - it extends 
 WH> multimedia (MMOS2 directory)
Oh,  OK.  That makes some sense,  I guess...
RT> Other than that,  I've been playing with the system,  and 
RT> exploring things.  The biggest problem I am seeing so far is 
RT> the fact that I'm running it on a 386dx40 with only 8M of ram,  
RT> and there seems to be a tendency for the thing to start 
RT> thrashing the HD at the slightest provocation!  Slow as heck,  
RT> too,  and I guess I can see why people seem to want to throw 
RT> RAM at this OS,  but I can't do anything about that at this 
RT> point in time unless I can find a good deal on some 4M 30-pin 
RT> parts.
 WH> As my pappy used to say 'No Sh--!': of course it's slow - 
 WH> REALLY slow.  As I recall, you are working with Warp 3. 
Warp connect,  actually.
 WH> With 8 megs of RAM, you probably have a minimum swap file size 
 WH> of 12 - 14 meg. 
That sounds about right,  it was somewhere around there when I last looked at 
it...
 WH> That's just to hold the OS/2 swaps. Couple of things that will 
 WH> help some - it's STILL gonna be a dog, tho.  First, use 
 WH> selective install and WIPE OUT THE MULTIMEDIA SUPPORT!  It's a 
 WH> big memory load.  
Oh?  You mean no sound card support,  etc.?  All that it's doing at this 
point is using the sound card for opening/closing windows,  occasionally 
other things,  but I can live without that,  I guess.
 WH> Next, don't even thinka about running the Internet stuff - you 
 WH> wouldn't have enough memory for even a Pentium 266 to run at 
 WH> decent speeds. 
Ok.  I had installed that,  mostly to look at the doc files and such (there 
sure is a lot of confusing info in there!),  but I don't expect to *use* it 
from that machine.
 WH> After that, use minimal graphics on the desktop: solid colors, 
 WH> most icons hidden in folders, etc.
Ok,  I can do that,  no problem.
 WH> Next, bump the swap file to 32 meg or so.
Editing config.sys,  I take it?  Are you saying bump the "initial" parameter 
of that swappath line in there?  (Just checking...)
RT> Anything else I can do with this?  Any particulars I could post 
RT> here that would give a clue as to what I'm dealing with?
 WH> Still gonna be a dog and the biggest reason is memory - your 
 WH> just way under-gunned.  The only way you'll get decent 
 WH> performance with that hardware is lots of memory or run a 
 WH> text-only command line installation.  I ran OS/2 2.11 in 8 megs 
 WH> for development and it was acceptable (for that point in time) 
 WH> until I installed multimedia - then it ground to a halt.  
I read in this book here that 3 has _less_ of a memory requirement than 2.1 
did.  It'd sure simplify things for me if I could keep the network support, 
though.
 WH> You might be a bit happier with no multimedia and no TCP/IP 
 WH> stuff, but I doubt it.  Fun exercise, tho.
I can lose the tcp/ip stuff,  no problem.  I'm also looking around with some 
thoughts about what I might be able to trade up to,  since I have a number of 
386 boards here.
I've got this new drive still sitting in its packaging waiting for me to 
figure out what to do with it,  and I'm thinking that building another 386 
machine for the bbs,  moving the drives over to that,  and sticking that new 
6.4G drive in here might be the way to go.  Then I can network it to the 
other machine and run stuff off the drive here.
I thought,  way before I even started to try my first install,  that 8M might 
be a little marginal,  so before I started even messing around with this 
stuff I upped this machine (a 5x86/133) to 16M,  figuring that'd be a good 
start.  And I'll be happy to augment that a bit further as finances permit,  
too.
Now if I can just remember what it was that somebody said I needed to change 
to support that big drive...
email: roy.j.tellason%tanstaaf@frackit.com 
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