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© 2004 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
AS DESKTOP PUBLISHING enters
the Windows 3.0 age, many of the rules
about hardware and software are being
rewritten. Chief among these is the issue
of just how much muscle your system needs.
New versions of software are becoming so beefed up that they should be tested for steroids. The executable file that starts PageMaker 4.0 is 1.3 Mb. Corel Draw requires 8 Mb, unless you install the clip art also—then the number rises to over 15. The fact that these new software programs cry out for a 386 machine is accepted by virtually all PC publishers, but many users feel that that edict doesn’t go far enough. A standard medium-speed 386 might not be up to the task of driving new Windows 3.0 software. I recently recommended that a friend switch to a 386 machine to run Windows 3.0 and PageMaker 4.0, because her AT wouldn’t be fast enough. She bought a 386 SX, we loaded everything onto it, and ran the software. Then I sheepishly told here that she might want to get a faster 386, because this one might not be fast enough.
How fast is fast? More importantly, how
do you achieve fast? I recently completed
an overhaul of my system, in pursuit of
determining just how much hardware muscle
I needed to run Windows software acceptably,
and which particular components have the
most impact on performance. My results
might
surprise you—they surprised me.
My system began as a 386-20, with a 100 Mb hard drive and 4Mb of memory. It ended up as a 386-33, with a 150 Mb hard drive and 8 Mb of memory. My display adaptor and monitor remained a constant. I had expected that the jump from a 20Mhz board to a 33 would be noticeable and dramatic; it was the former, not the latter. I had expected the move to a bigger and faster hard drive to be significant; it was. I had expected the increase in memory to return a slight increase in performance; it didn’t—its return was exceptional.
Without a doubt, the most significant component in my upgrade was the move to 8Mb of RAM. It was also the cheapest, what with 1MB SIMs dipping well below $50 each. I am convinced that insufficient memory is the leading cause of software crashes and erratic behavior, and among the guilty parties are software developers who understate minimum requirements. Ventura Publisher, for instance, cites 2Mb of RAM as the minimum requirement for running the Windows version. Regular users of the product know that to be a joke.
These monsters need elbow room in a big way, and the more you give them the happier they are. Increased speed of a computer is only significant if it translates into a similar increase in your productivity. Barring outright incompetence on your part, or choosing crummy software, the biggest deterrent to productivity is software that crashes and systems that lock up.
Therefore, my advice is the same to everyone, regardless of their software choices or the type of documents they produce: make sure you get a motherboard that can accommodate at least 8 Mb of RAM and fill it to capacity. There is just no sense in skimping in this very critical area, especially when memory costs are so low as to be almost trivial. Sufficient reserves of memory also make possible the second most important component.
How ironic that the second most important component costs between zero and 50 dollars. With 8Mb of memory, you can afford to devote a full 1Mb to disk caching, the magical operation that substantially reduces disk drive activity. If your system can read data from memory instead of from the comparatively slow magnetic medium of your hard drive, you are in for enormous time-savings. The larger the cache, the more data can be stored in RAM. Desktop publishing applications stand to gain considerably from disk caching, as there are many tasks that require repeated trips to the hard drive to retrieve massive amounts of code. Screen fonts, dialog box overlay files, printer drivers, help files, templates, style sheets—these program parts are continuously being called into action. Th larger your cache, the more of their code stays in memory.
Many of today’s shell, menu, and swiss-army-knife type programs come bundled with disk cache software, and perhaps the most highly touted cache of all, HyperDisk, is available as shareware. Even if you go with Microsoft’s low-end SMARTDRV, you’re way ahead of the game. The more you can buffer the activity of your hard drive, the more you reduce the importance of Component No. 3...
Disk caching notwithstanding, data makes its journey into memory from one source—your hard drive (unless you only work off of floppies, in which case you are beyond help). Disk drive speeds are several orders of magnitude below memory speed, and the best you can do is soften the blow with the fastest hard drive you can afford.
It’s practically a given that you’re going to need close to 100Mb of capacity, maybe more. In addition, you should keep your eye on two other numbers: access time and data transfer rate, the first measured in milliseconds (smaller numbers being better) and the second measured in kilobytes of data per second (larger numbers being better). Access times should be no higher than 20. Investing in a hard drive with access times in the low teens will result in real and noticeable improvements in system performance.
While you can cache 1Mb or so of data, Windows and the software running thereunder routinely throw around megabytes of data as if they were juggling balls. The faster the data come off of the hard drive, the better.
Much to my surprise, the clock speed of the 386 board resulted in the smallest improvement. Don’t get me wrong—a 33Mhz machine is definitely faster than a similar 16, 20, or a 25Mhz machine, and the differential cost is small enough to tempt many users who are on the fence about which and how many components to upgrade. But upgrading the motherboard and leaving memory count at 2 or 4Mb, or upgrading the board but leaving your 38Ms hard drive in the system is not the right call. A 16Mhz 386 with 8Mb will routinely outperform a 33Mhz 4Mb uncached system.
Things have changed since the entre of Windows 3.0. It used to be that adding a turbo board or a replacement motherboard was the best thing you could do. Memory was an afterthought. Today, it is the most precious resource of all, and should be first on your list of upgrade items.
I have little doubt that as I contemplate my next move, I will look seriously at replacing the 1Mb SIMs on my board, increasing to 16Mb of RAM and dedicating 4Mb of RAM to a disk cache. Sounds like overkill? Not anymore.
This article really was published, in 1991, and the author was serious in all of his assertions. Scary, eh...?
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May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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