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The LangaList

26-Nov-99

A Free Email Newsletter from Fred Langa About BrowserTune,
HotSpots, Columns, Tips & Tricks, and Other Activities

In This Issue:
Happy Thanksgiving!
FREE: A *Super* Speed-Up!
More, er, Universal Information
A Sixth (and Seventh, and...) Great Access-Sharing Solution
Burn Before Reading
Last Chance For November's Book Drawing
Just For Grins
More!

Happy Thanksgiving!

This issue was delayed one day due to the US Thanksgiving holiday. 

Of course, and sadly, millions in the US and hundreds of millions elsewhere have little to be thankful for. But here's a way you can help, and it won't cost you a dime: Click on over to http://www.hungersite.com and follow the instructions. For every click they collect, the sponsors donate free food to the hungry. It's for-real, and already has fed an enormous number of people.

You can spare a click, can't you?

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FREE: A *Super* Speed-Up!

Want to speed your hard drive by 15% or more? Reduce the load on your CPU by up to 40%? All for free? Read on:

A while ago, "Joy" wrote to me and asked:

Hi Fred. Is there any problem enabling DMA mode for the hard drive in the check box in Device Manager? I have a 13.9Gig, 7200 rpm, UDMA IBM hard drive. Does it make sense that it isn't checked? --- Joy

Joy was referring to "direct memory access," a way for one part of a computer to bypass the CPU and take a "short cut" that can significantly speed operations. In Windows, you can see your hard drive's current DMA settings by right clicking on My Computer, then Properties, then Device Manager, then Disk Drives. Next, click on your hard drive(s)---it may have an opaque name such as "Generic IDE Disk Type 01"---and then click on the Settings Tab. If you have a system of reasonably recent vintage, you'll probably see an *UN*checked DMA option in the dialog box. 

Alas, I didn't have much to tell Joy: To tell the truth, although I'd tweaked and tuned almost every other part of Windows at one point or another, I'd never really looked into the DMA settings. 

Fortunately, Joy didn't stop there. A few days later she wrote again:

Hi Fred. I thought you might appreciate the follow-up on this. A friend ( Dave Henry) did lots of researching and came up with some interesting information....

It makes me wonder why my computer wasn't set up this way before it was shipped. It obviously would be a huge improvement. This would surely help lots of people who are not using the DMA setting.

I haven't made the changes on my computer as yet. I hope to have a tech walk me through it, although when I talked to the techs about it previously, they passed it off as no big deal, and they discouraged any changes.---Joy

"Discouraged" is probably too mild a term. In fact, if you try to click the DMA option box in Windows' Device Manager, you get a dire warning to this effect: "Changing this setting may have undesirable effects on your hardware." That's enough to scare off most people. Who wants to trash a hard drive?

But, given Joy's and Dave's information, I was intrigued enough to do some digging on my own.

Microsoft's KnowledgeBase says in part:

Many people are familiar with the gains to be had from using IDE hard drives and CD-ROM drives in DMA mode; a typical machine today will use 40% of the CPU doing hard drive transfers in PIO mode and use only 25% of the CPU doing hard drive transfers in DMA mode, on the same hardware.

Hmmmm. That sounds great. But the factory-installed hard drive in my (almost new) primary system is a Maxtor, and it arrived with the DMA option not checked; it was not running in DMA mode. So I visited the Maxtor site and found this ( http://www.maxtor.com/technology/glossary2.html#D ):

DMA is a means of data transfer between the device and host memory without processor intervention. There are two DMA modes, Single and Multi-Word. Since single word is slower than PIO mode, no one uses it. It will be ignored here. Multi Word DMA is used in EISA, VLB, and PCI equipped systems. They are capable of the very fast transfer rates, utilizing cycle times of 480ns or faster.

So clearly, Microsoft and Maxtor both agree that DMA is a Good Thing; and yet the Windows factory settings on my Maxtor drive were NOT to use DMA.

What the heck. The next day, right after I'd made the day's full backup (and thus was safe from any data errors that changing the access method might cause), I first ran a hard drive benchmark, then used Device Manager to select DMA mode, and rebooted.

Everything ran fine. In fact, the first thing I did was rerun the hard drive benchmark---and saw an immediate 15% speed increase.

Since then, I have to say that on long disk operations (loading large apps, for example), it feels much, much more than just 15% faster. And I've had no trouble whatsoever.

Dave had even better results: using a synthetic hard drive benchmark, he had his CPU utilization drop from 98% to 4%.

I've since checked my other systems here, and all my mainline PCs are DMA-capable; but NONE--- not one!--- was set up to use DMA. I have no idea why; it makes no sense. (Needless to say, all my DMA-capable systems are now using the DMA option.)

If you want to try DMA mode, visit the vendor's site for the system and/or the hard drive brand you have; search for information and advice on whether or not to use the DMA option. Or: Your system's BIOS information may show whether or not your have a DMA-capable drive.

If the answer is clearly yes or no, then stick with what the manufacturer says. But if the answer is unclear, and if you have a good backup, you might want to give it a try. Supposedly, if your drive doesn't support DMA transfers, nothing bad will happen, and the drive will simply revert to non-DMA mode.

But if it does work, you just might pick up a nontrivial amount of disk speed that you'd paid for, but weren't using!

Thanks, Joy and Dave!

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More, er, Universal Information

In the last issue (see http://www.langa.com/newsletters/nov-22-99.htm#byte ) I talked about how the convergence of  the Web and PCs has literally placed the universe at your fingertips. Free, high-powered software that's available online lets you stay current with the night sky, track manmade objects in space, and much more. Online, you can peer through some of mankind's most powerful telescopes, including Hubble; although if you have your own 'scope, the digital revolution will help there, too.

Reader (and astronomy enthusiast) Scott McMahan wrote:

I saw your piece on space and the computer and wanted to share a few gems I've found:

J-track 3D, http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/Jtrack/3d/JTrack3d.html This is a NASA site that has a really cool Java Applet that shows the Earth and the position of up to 500 man made satelites in real time and in 3-D! You can drag your mouse on the screen and rotate up/down or left/right, click on a dot and the orbital path appears as a ring,

I like to rotate the planet down so i'm looking at the north pole, then Ctrl-click to zoom out until I can see the ring of Geostationary Sats. (do yourself a favor and zoom out some more, you might find Chandra or Interbol!)

STSPlus, This is a great shuttle tracking program, it has everything you could want, but you do have to download the current Two-Line Elements to keep it accurate. It even has a special feature for Hams, it gives the doppler shift so you can talk to the shuttle via radio, maybe.

SkyGlobe, This is a small, simple sky map program, The original version ran like a champ on a 286 from less than 360k of disk space. 25,000 stars, +/-30,000 yrs. The newer versions are a little bigger and more windows friendly, and I like to use the thing as a screen saver by removing all the lines, and menus and setting it to update in real time so the stars and planets and nothing else, move across my screen. (you can let your kids use the Windows paint program to draw the planets, or convert your favorite .jpg of a galaxy far far away to .pcx and when you click on the little dot on the screen, the image is displayed in all its glory.)

Thanks, Scott! 

In looking for sources of the software Scott mentions, I found a great site with tons of space-related software (for PCs, Macs, UNIX, Amigas, etc): http://www.satellite.eu.org/sat/vsohp/orbsoft.html

Check 'em out, and be sure to see the original column at Byte.Com that started this whole topic <g>: http://www.byte.com/column/monitor/BYT19991117S0002

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Great reading for cold nights: Check out the 13
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A Sixth (and Seventh, and...) Great Access-Sharing Solution

Readers are adding their own unique input to augment my discussion of five new Internet-connection sharing tools. (See http://content.techweb.com/winmag//columns/explorer/1999/1122.htm )

For example, in addition to the ones I reviewed, reader Matthew Penney suggests this:

I have found an easy to use internet connection sharing program. It is called InternetGate by maccasoft. You can get a free download from www.maccasoft.com . I like this one because it can run as an application or on NT machines (which I have) it can run as a service. I have had trouble getting other programs to work but I tried this one and it worked excellent. The best part is that you only have to install it on the "Server" machine and use the browser's proxy settings to access it.

The ability to run as a service (an invisible background app, with no "footprint" in the taskbar or tray) is nice: Sygate does that, too.

For more information on all the above, and more (such as Wingate...) see http://content.techweb.com/winmag//columns/explorer/1999/1122.htm 

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Burn Before Reading

That's the punchline to an old joke about the handling of sensitive information: Some information is so top secret, you should burn it before you open it.

OK, dumb joke, but the concept actually is a useful one. For example, some people wrote to ask me how they could delete "Bubbleboy" related email without having it end up in the preview pane and thus triggering the virus. (See http://www.langa.com/newsletters/nov-15-99.htm#bubbleboy )

Other readers have expressed problems like this:

Fred, I am having a problem with my email.

I am using Outlook 98. Someone is sending me mail that automatically responds when I view their letter. I understand they set that to occur in the rules wizard of their Outlook program. My question is: How can I keep my mail from auto responding when she sends to me? Appreciate your time, and your newsletter. Thanks---Bill Raco

One solution to both problems is to set up a "Filter," which is a kind of mail-robot that sorts your mail as it comes in, before you see it. You can set the filters to place suspect mail in a special folder, to auto-respond (or not) or even to delete the mail outright.

I handle a lot of spam and chain mails that way: After the second or third instance, when it's clear that I'll be getting the same piece of, er, mail over and over, I create a filter that automatically dumps the offending mail in the trash without my ever having to see it.

All good email readers have filters that can react to keywords or phrases, specific sender names or address, and more: Check your email reader's help file!

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Last Chance For November's Book Drawing

It's almost time for me to select another monthly winner of a copy of "Poor Richard's E-Mail Publishing: Creating Newsletters, Bulletins, Discussion Groups and Other Powerful Communications Tools." This book has been described as "An excellent, straightforward manual on email publishing, banner ads, driving traffic and especially ethics."  

To enter,  just use the following link to recommend the LangaList to a friend. Your friend just may find a new source of useful information; I just may gain a new subscriber; and you just may win a book! (Full details also available via this link):

http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm#2 

Or, if you'd like to try to win a Palm III organizer, try this link (full details also available here):

http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm#1

Either way, thank you, and good luck!

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