fredch@starlite.hf.intel.com (08/22/90)
I bought a 386SX clone last Friday and joyfully brought it home. Put on
DOS, and the M-Mouse stuff and played away. All the time, the little LED
was showing 16 MHz (and I could press the turbo button repeatedly and get
it to cycle 16->8->16 ...). Then, I loaded Windows 3.0 and played with
that for a while. (Perhaps foolishly) I diddled with the Colors accessory
and created my own preferences file. Then, I played with PaintBrush and
Write. Once in Write, whoops! no text. Arg! silly me! I had set "Window
Text" to white fg-on-white bg intending white-fg only. So, I iconized
Write and brought up Colors. Suddenly, ALL the pull-down lists in the
pallette were empty except for the current selection (my prefs) and some
box titles were absent. Has anyone seen this?
I presumed I had stumbled across a bug and some data structure had gotten
trashed. So, I rebooted. It was then and only then (but surely had happened
sometime before), that I noticed my LED showed 8 MHz and no amount of button
pressing could change that. So, I changed my autoexec and came up without
going straight to Windows. Still only 8 MHz. I then took out the two entries
in config.sys that the Windows setup had added. BINGO! I had 16 MHz again!
Anyone know what himem.sys is doing that might cause it to reset the Hz?
I also tried leaving in the smartdrive.sys line while leaving out the
himem.sys line and rebooting. Still 16MHz (and the turbo button works).
Then I tried putting the himem.sys line back in and rebooting. Before my
eyes, I saw the LED go from 16 to 8 right when config.sys was being used to
configure (well, after the BIOS crud and before my autoexec echo's). Gotcha!
Questions:
1) Any solution to the himem.sys gotcha?
2) What do I loose if I do not have himem.sys in my config.sys?
3) The Smartdrive disk cacher puts out a message about the XMS driver
not being present when I have that entry but not himem. Is that fatal
or warning or info-only?
4) Does Windows require these two or are there alternatives? For example,
I have Hyperware's HyperDisk and Polytron disk cachers available to me.
Thanks for helping this newcomer to comp.windows.ms.
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Fred Christiansen, Intel, JF1-67 503-696-4214 | fredch@starlite.hf.intel.com
5200 NE Elam Young Prkwy, Hillsboro, OR 97124 | uunet!intelhf!starlite!fredch
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