riordanmr@clvax1.cl.msu.edu (Mark Riordan) (07/23/90)
I'm having a puzzling performance problem under Windows 3.0 on an AT&T 6386 WGS. Disk I/O is very slow under Windows, but reasonably fast under straight DOS. I would muchly appreciate any help from the net. Here's the configuration: AT&T 6386 WGS, 16 MHz 80386, 135 MB disk drive (it has > 1024 cylinders, but I have only a 128 MB partition on it so the partition has < 1024 cylinders), 4MB memory, AT&T 98% compatible EGA monitor, disk newly formatted with MS DOS 4.01 (i.e., fragmentation is not a problem), 10MB permanent swap file, SMARTDRV.SYS installed. For comparison, my personal machine at home is a 25 MHz 80386 clone, 4 MB memory, 128MB disk drive, Video 7 Fastwrite VGA, MS DOS 4.01, 12MB permanent swap file, SMARTDRV.SYS installed. Windows takes 42 seconds to start on the AT&T machine, versus 13.6 seconds on my similar machine at home. On the AT&T machine under DOS 4.01, COPY \WINDOWS\WRITE.EXE NUL takes 0.92 seconds. Start up Windows 3.0, open up a DOS session, and execute the same command, and it takes 7.5 seconds. On my home machine, the same command executes very quickly either from DOS or from a Windows DOS session. All disk-related activity seems very slow on the AT&T machine under Windows; this is just one example. Other than the slow disk I/O, the AT&T machine runs Windows 3.0 fine. (The EGA monitor goes to 43-line mode by default for a DOS session, but that's probably just a slighly incompatible Olivetti EGA board.) Any ideas? Mark Riordan Michigan State University riordanmr@clvax1.cl.msu.edu