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Chek out this info on the next version of OS/2 codenamed Merlin!

First of all a short list of the major components of my system:

  • - AMD 486DX4/120 CPU
  • - 32 Meg RAM
  • - Promise EIDE 2300 Plus HD and I/O controller
  • - 1.2 Gig Western Digital HD
  • - ATI Graphics ProTurbo 2 Meg VRAM graphics controller
  • - Nanao T2-17ts monitor (17", DiamondTron tube)
  • - Sound Blaster 16 sound card
  • - Toshiba 4x IDE CD-ROM drive

    • The actual OS/2 operating system running on my machine is the Warp RedSpine issue (OS/2 for systems with Windows v3.1/3.11 installed). I have FixPack 17 installed and running well.

    The only thing I can say to anyone who's ever thought about OS/2 is: You gotta try it to believe it!

    OS/2 is very peculiar it seems when it comes to the exact hardware configuration, this is as it should be since OS/2 will squeeze the last bits of performance out of your machine. Here are a few things I learned along the way:

  • - if you're using the Promise controller with their drivers and they don't seem to work, try including the /!SMS parameter. It disables multiple sector transfer support. It seems the controller has a hard time with this setting when the drive is on the VL-bus side. This might not be necessary for any drives running on the IDE side of the controller. Performance wise it doesn't seem to affect it much (if not at all).

  • - on up to 16 Meg RAM systems set your swap file to 20 Meg at least, especially if you ever run seamless Win-OS/2 sessions, or even full windowed Windows sessions. Also position the swap file in the root directory of the least active hard drive (if your system has more than one HD).

  • - for the disk cache (FAT drives) set the max. block size to 128. This means that the max size of any file being cached is 64K, seems to work better on my system than any other smaller values.

  • - for the cache (HPFS drives) set the /CRECL:64. Same story as above, max. file size to be cached is 64K. Seems to work well since most of the OS/2 DLLs you'll find in the /OS2/DLL directory are around 64K in size, and those are the DLLs which the system uses the most.

    •

    That's about it for hints and tips. If you're interested in programming for OS/2 check out a short book reference in my Projects - Operating Systems page. Another great source of programming information is the EDM/2 on-line magazine.

    Following is a short list of my most useful OS/2 links:

  • - OS/2 Warp Online Exploration Guide
  • - OS/2 WWW Homepage
  • - OS/2 Warp home page
  • - OS/2 Benchmark Center
  • - OS/2 Benchmark Page
  • - OS/2 Various Links
  • - OS/2 Internet Resources
  • - OS/2 Internet Applications
  • - OS/2 Links
  • - OS/2 Warp Monthly Newsletter
  • - OS/2 World
  • - OS/2 Web
  • - OS/2 "Must-Have" Utilities and FTP Links
  • - OS/2 e-Zine! - The on-line OS/2 magazine.
  • - OS/2 CONNECT
  • - The Ultimate OS/2 Gaming Page
  • - Internet Direct OS/2 WARP Homepage
  • - IBM's Netcomber Internet Suite
  • - IBM Does The Java Jive!
  • - IBM Software Page
  • - Club OpenDoc
  • - OpenGL at IBM
  • - The Electronic Magazine for OS/2 developers
  • - XFree86/OS2 project

    • Hopefully that is enough information to let you find anything about OS/2 that you might need. If you have a site which you think I might find useful by all means please let me know!

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