experiences with dos i have been having trouble posting this article from within tin for over a week if you do get multiple copies my apologies here is a challenge to microsoft or microsort supporters to defend the pathetic state of dos as an upgrade distribution it is a long story but would make good reading for those who are interested in knowing the potential pitfalls of upgrading to dos that i have been able to notice after only about a week of playing around with it my envorinment ti travelmate winsx sx m ram m disk system bios version by texas instruments cl gd vga bios v a by cirrus logic quadtel advance power manager battery pro v b by texas instruments smart drive cache win dos parameters a b windows benchmark winbench tm v by zd labs after updgrading to dos i could not understand why certain things became so slow especially after i decided to try dblspace in the process of finding out why i discovered some interesting things disk performance with double space and smart drive while most things did not appear to slow down most of the time certain applications appeared to run very much slower what was interesting is that commands like chkdsk and defrag were running far too slowly to consider them useful by any standards i suspected double space ds and decided to measure its impact on my system using winbench tm the real disk winmark of for the original system as shipped from factory with dos and windowws became when upgraded to dos with ds thus there is an effective performance degradation of more than percent which did not really surprise me because i knew that ds compression must cost something specifically for short sequential reads up to bytes ds actually improves transfer rates by about because cpu being faster than i o more cpu cycles needed for ds is more than compensated by savings in i o cycles however for all other cases particularly large random writes the transfers take up to three times as long while the performance depends on the type of access i e random or sequential small or large transfer units on the average based on winbench s assumptions the disk slows down to half its speed the tests alone done in real mode see winbench and with smartdrv on do not say much except that it helps to put into those subjective statements like there is no noticable difference in performance or even that it will speed up disk access when you have a fast cpu and slow disk i o this explained why some applications ran markedly slower but not why chkdsk and defrag the latter especially too so long double space and windows dblspace will not run at all from within windows not even if you wanted to only to get information not modify anything or for that matter even check on its usage try fasthelp dblspace in a dos box within windows and you will see what i mean from the error message you get how narrow minded can a programer get i wonder yes this information can be obtained through the mstools dd add on to file manager but this mstools dll does not understand a compressed floppy use the dos supplement utility to create a compressed floppy if you dont know how to dos defragmenter is incompatible with ti apm defragmentation seemed to take too much time even so i waited patiently till it finished and then ran it again to just to confirm this confirmation dblspace def command for the m drive should take no more than seconds much faster on other defragmenters i have used but it took minutes i discovered that if i moved the mouse defragmentation checking ran faster the figure ticked more rapidly it dawned on me that this had to do with ti s battery saver advanced power management apm module which slows the clock down when it thinks that the cpu is idle and it obviously thought ds defragmentation was an idle process after disabling the ti s power saver this operation took only seconds microsft programmers think ti and gateway nomad users are idiots in the readme txt file you can find the the following running microsoft backup with ti and gateway nomad computers to avoid a conflict between the turbo feature and microsoft backup for windows or ms dos add a l switch to the device command in your config sys that loads the battery pro file or before you run microsoft backup type setpower l at the command prompt if you checked ti s manual on the l option you will realise that it means disable all power saving features of your notebook why would anyone want to run a driver disabled as i have found out not only does ti s power management interfere with microsoft backup as the readme txt claims but chkdsk and dblspace and who knows what else are crippled by the ti s power saver it is obvious that there is not such thing as apm specifications if there indeed is such a thing then either microsoft programmers or ti programmers dont know how to read these specifications you dont have to guess as to who are the idiots by the way if you run the advance power management utility power exe in dos when you check the status it says power management status setting adv max cpu idle of time this figure of seems to be the steady state value on my notebook when i am running nothing windows with only program manager in iconised form does that mean that windows takes up of my cpu all for itself and that i have at best only left for useful work is such an overhead justified whether or not windows is an operating system or just another user interface in dos alone it reports idle time looks like windows is a good example of busy waiting type of package that i like my students to study as the classical negative example of our times microsoft programmers do not know batch programming i like to structure my startup script and thus have the equivalent of addpath statements like this set path c dos set path c etc bin path c bin set path c etc windows path c windows set path path c bcc bin set path path mouse even though the new dos was installed in the same directory as the old one i e c dos dos installation program modifes each and every path statement and prepends c dos to its value as a result my resultant path has so many dos s if the installation program wanted to remove the old dos path and add the new dos path clearly it has to only scan for the path statement containg the old dos directory and replace it by the new dos path even this should only be done if the new dos is installed in a directory different from the old one being upgraded instead the microsoft programmer if you can call this person one decided to meddle every path statement i had in the autoexec and prepend dos to the value i wonder if microsoft is so desparate that it would not fire programmers who are incapable of the thought process i started a thread on this when dos came up and the microsoft representative in singapore called me about this poster in fact he specifically said his us counterparts saw the poster and relayed the information to him as he did not have access to internet now that has not changed one bit in fact if you have a path statement with path already in it is it not obvious that the this statement should not be touched for any reason as another example of the inability of microsoft programmers to understand batch programming i had the mouse driver invoked as set mouse c etc mouse set path path mouse loadhigh mouse mouse com guess what memmaker did it replaced the last statement with lh c etc mouse mouse com why is it so difficult just to replace loadhigh with lh and its parameters without touching the rest of the line i do not understand dos software quality dos is the only operating system i know in which under normal usage you end up creating a file that you cannot get rid of using of the commands that come with it i am deliberately being cryptic about this i challenge microsoft to use all its programmers to catch this bug and publish it if they dont within a week i will post how you can create this ghost file surely if i can pick this bug without even looking for it after using a particular command only twice i am sure two dozen microsoft idiot programmers randomly banging on their keyboards over a week could find it that is what i was told how microsoft tests the quality of their products i think it is funny that microsoft has found ways to test quality when it is accepted in the industry that quality cannot be tested but can only be built into the product no wonder they cannot provide any form of guarantees on their products not even a decent list of bugs that will prevent scores of user from destroying their disks beyond repair also if you run dblspace def often enough repeatedly when the disk is fully defragmented you may get errors that was created by the defragmenters i got my io sys file size error and it got truncated when i did the chkdsk this happend only after five successive defragmentation efforst after the first one supposedly did its job and with no new file creation since microsft dont you dare reply to this poster on the network until you admit that your ds has bugs and are willing to let us know what we should watch out for if we have already used ds jaya dr jayasooriah cse cs e unsw sign in a paris hotel p o box kensington nsw tel fax a sports jacket may be worn to dinner internet jayas vast unsw edu au but not trousers dr jayasooriah cse cs e unsw sign in a norwegian cocktail lounge p o box kensington nsw ladies are requested tel fax not to have children internet jayas vast unsw edu au in the bar
