How to Optimize your system, and get better frame rates

[Guest]

>I am a techie, and that is not how cacheman works. Thanks for clarifying that, John. See, I told you I wasn't a techie! :D

[Guest gasebah]

Absolutely. It kills approx. 6 out of 8 tasks that I have running after bootup. The system tray is completely emptied. What remains running is basically system stuff that is better left untouched. Everything that is not directly protected by windows will get killed. The only downside is that you have to reboot for some programs to use. Alex

[Guest JonP01]

Just a point about defragging and hard drive performance in general. Pure defragging (on it's own) is not as effective a tool as it is when used in conjunction with partition management software. The thing with FS2002 (and CFS2) is that they will always be pulling small amounts of data continuously from your hard drive, regardless of how much RAM you have. And even if you have huge amounts of RAM such that you can spare very large amounts of memory for vcache, the fact remains the data still has to be read off the hard drive and put into memory in the first place.If you really want to totally optimise this aspect of performance, it could be worth your while to partition your hard drive in such a way that your FS2002 files are maintained in a relatively small partition located on the outer most cylinders on your hard drive. By doing this, you are decreasing the hard drive seek-times (and access times) because the required files will always be grouped together within a small geometric area on your hard drive. Also, the data i/o rate is fastest on the outer most cylinders.On my setup, I have 5 partitions, with the OS being located just on the threshold of the Win98 8GB boot barrier. The first partition (FAT with 32K clusters) holds CFS2. The second partition, again FAT with 32K clusters holds FS2002. Basically, the more I/O sensitive an application is, the further towards the outer cylinders I place it. In my experience, a partitioned and defragged setup provides better, and above all more consistent performance than a defragged, non-partitioned setup alone. Even the best defragging software can't do as good a job.Whilst partitioning is a potential pain, if you use software like Partition Magic, allocating and maintaining partitions becomes very fast and very simple. Something that would have taken many hours takes only seconds or a couple of minutes at most. Certainly in my own case, there is no way I would go back to an ordinary setup after experiencing the performance benefits of doing things this way.