Subject: From: Date:

Re: [ECS] ECSW & Win98 Daniel Dubay Tue, 11 Aug 1998 17:02:47 -0400

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Hello Larry,

I don't know about most of your questions, but I am using an old quad serial board
that shares one IRQ.  It works fine under windows 95.  It is an ISA board.  I'm
looking for another one.  Does anyone have a recommendation?

Dan Dubay

LEC1964@aol.com wrote:

>        I have been running ECSW under Windows 98 for the past five or six
> weeks with generally no problems attributable to the 98 version. My opinion is
> that Windows 98 is Windows 95 "Plus". Nothing much different to speak of, just
> a few more bells and whistles.
>        I elected to use Windows 98 because of Microsoft's moronic decision to
> restrict access to Windows 95 OSR2. For those of you that don't know, the
> retail version of Windows 95 does not support "Ultra-DMA" and the IDE Bus
> Master features along with a number of fixes and revisions. The OSR2 version
> was available if you purchased a new computer recently or supposedly a new
> motherboard or hard drive or if you begged some one to sell it to you. Very
> irritating since I had upgraded by purchasing a motherboard with the Intel
> chipset that supports these features. I did try Intels separate drivers. That
> was a riot. With Windows 98 I believe all of the OSR2 features are available
> and everything seems to work as advertised.
>        As far as FAT32 goes, personally, I see no reason to use it. With the
> costs of very large hard drives so reasonable, if I need more disk space, I'll
> buy a new one. I am not sure that the authorization would be seen as valid
> code during a FAT32 conversion so to be on the safe side I would not leave it
> there. There is also a very great risk it will not work at all under FAT32. I
> would just be very careful. As it applies to me, I try to use the "KISS"
> principle as often as possible just to keep me out of trouble.
>        A caveat here, (No disrespect Mark G.) but I don't trust upgrades. I
> don't care to have manipulation of my carefully installed software by anyone
> and there has to be a very good reason to accept the risks that are involved.
> There also is a very good reason your always told to backup your hard drive
> during these episodes. So I did not "upgrade" to Windows 98. It was loaded on
> to a bare drive followed by ECS and Microsoft's SDK30.
>        I did have some difficulty getting IRQ assignments to my liking. If
> your BIOS is PnP ready you do have some control over IRQ assignments. Once I
> sorted that out, they fell in exactly as I wanted.
>        For those of you that might be interested, I have for many years run
> ECS from a RAM drive. With ECS 3.2 it was very easy. Of course a RAM drive of
> adaquate size is created and all necessary files transferred to appropriate
> directories. A UPS is an necessity. Comspec should define the location for
> command.com. The hard drive's 12v and 5v potentials were switched off manually
> leaving ECS entirely running from the fastest memory available (RAM). I also
> felt with the hard drive "off line" there was a special protection for the
> authorization and the ecs.cfg. I could do editing with the RAM drive version
> and testing prior to making it permanent on the hard drive side which was kind
> of neat. Some would say that turning your hard drive on and off  (thermal
> shock) is more damaging than leaving it on all the time. To me ECS is a
> "working" system and once I'm satisfied I don't make a lot of changes. There
> was one period of 14 months where the hard drive was not turned on at all. One
> other nice feature is that I don't have an "F-16 at at mach 2" as a permanent
> visitor in my den. The high pitch whine of a hard drive is very aggrivating. I
> also have purchased power supplies designed to be ultra quiet (large cooling
> fans turning less RPM). Some visitors actually have to ask if the computer is
> on. To say the least this definitely pleased my wife.
>        I am currently running ECSW (under Windows 98) from a 30 mb RAM drive
> using the BIOS (not Windows) to "depower" the hard drive after 3 minutes of
> idle time. Although testing is not complete, everything so far looks very
> good. Only ECS has been relocated to the RAM drive. I start ECS using the run
> command ,obviously not the ECS ICON. I have picked up some additional cooling
> fan noise since Intel can't design a processor for a desktop without putting a
> fan on it. As far as how often hard drive access is required I really don't
> know. It's not often. Once the system settles down I don't detect it at all
> unless I minimize ECS and use Windows.
>        Since the subject came up a while back about performance, specifically
> event processing, I might mention that with my 2700 event lines in 67 events I
> run generally 13 event passes/sec and communicating with the Micro REDAC is
> basically the defining performance factor. I really don't know if 13
> passes/sec is  good or bad, but I am running much faster than my old system.
> One thing I did do years ago was to add testing at the beginning of most
> events. The few added event lines test to see if I really need to go down
> through the entire code in that event. The test lines end with an entry: "Else
> Event Exit  Set  True", which I assume would limit most of my processing to
> essential events and to others on demand.
>        I would like to end by posing a few questions. (1.) If I elected to use
> the USB (Universal Serial Bus) say for the keyboard, the mouse and possibly
> for the printer would their original IRQ's be available for reassignment? In
> my case that would be 1, 12, and 7. I sure could use them. What would be their
> status? (2.) In the past I was able to "share" IRQ 7. Windows 98 (device
> manager) had a real problem with this. Is it because one of the newer
> "enhanced" parallel port was defined? My printer and most that I know of don't
> use interrupts anyway. In fact I recently set up a friends older computer
> under Windows 98 and Windows didn't assign any interrupts to lpt1 and his
> printer works fine. (3.) Has anyone used the new dual    comport card that
> works off the PCI bus? Does Windows Device Manager accept shared interrupts
> for Comports on the PCI bus?
>
> Larry C.

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