kjj44752@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Kirsten J Johnson) (10/13/90)
I am posting the following message for my brother since he is unable
to post. Please followup here or send email to him at:
uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ibmchs!auschs!marichal.austin.ibm.com!jeff
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I was playing around with my DOS setup the other day and noticed some
very weird behaviour of the SHELL= statement in CONFIG.SYS.
I need more than 160 bytes of environment space. I have been using
shell=c:\command.com /p /e:768
since DOS 3.1. That is one of the first things I set when installing a
new system. Well, the other day, I was reformatting my C: drive when a
noticed that my floppy access was great deal faster than usual. I also
ran Norton SI which reported my machine was faster than normal.
Normally, I get an SI of 27.2-27.4 depending on which way the wind
blows. That day, I got 30.3 repeatedly.
After some head scratching and poking around, I traced to the fact that
I didn't have a SHELL= statement in my CONFIG.SYS. When I have a
SHELL= statement, my floppy accesses are very slow (ie a DIR or FORMAT
take a LONG time) and my machine reports lower numbers on Norton SI. My
floppy drives have always been slow, and I thought it was my BIOS or
the WD HD/FD controller, but doesn't appear to be anymore. The
difference in speed is like night and day!
Any ideas or insights are welcome.
Here is my system configuration:
Microsoft MS-DOS 3.30A (OEM version from DTK)
DataExpert 386/25 Motherboard
C&T Chipset
AMI BIOS 9/15/89-k9
8 Meg 80ns 1Mx9 SIPP RAM (Interleaved for near 0 WS)
65MB CDC 5.25" Half Height Hard Drive
110MB CDC 5.25" Full Height Hard Drive
1.2M Teac 5.25" Floppy Drive
1.44M Toshiba 3.25" Floppy Drive
WD1006V-SR2 1:1 RLL HD/FD controller
2S/1P/1G multi-I/O Card
AST-Four Port Serial Board
Paradise VGA Plus Board (800x600x16)
SoundBlaster Board
Logitech C7 Serial Mouse
Taxan 770+ MultiVision Monitor
Northgate OmniKey Plus Keyboard
Has anyone developed a patch to COMMAND.COM to change the default
environment size without using SHELL=? I have the SETENV.EXE Microsoft
ships with MSC 5.1. It patches the default enviroment size in many
versions of COMMAND.COM, but not 3.30A.
Does anyone else think that 160 bytes of environment space is ludicrous?
My path can be longer than that.
Jeff
--
Jeff Johnson 10926 Jollyville Rd #1420
Computer Consultant Austin, TX 78759 (512) 343 0675
Email -> uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ibmchs!auschs!marichal.austin.ibm.com!jeff
Disclaimer: "My views and opinions do not reflect those of IBM"