Win 95 Tune-Up

These notes should help those familiar with Windows 95 tune it up for better performance. It is not a detailed series of steps or a cookbook. If you are not already comfortable with Win95, go get some practice and come back here later.

The default installation of Win95 assumes a machine of limited capabilities. If you have more than 8 MB of memory, and a few extra megabytes of hard drive space, you can take advantage of these to improve Win95's performance.

Before doing any of the steps below, make sure you have the most stable and usable version of Win95 installed -- preferably 95b or 95c.

The registry which assumes the functions of many of the initialization files associated with Windows 3 appears at first glance to be an impossible-to-understand collection of arcane parameters. In fact, some of them are so hard to understand that even Microsoft set some of the default values wrong. Note: This has been fixed in Win95B (OSR2).

The registry is assembled as a tree of sections, subsections and values, looking much like the familiar "directory" or "folder" trees seen in the explorer and file manager interfaces. From the "Start" button, enter "regedit". An explorer-like view of your computer and six major "HKEYs" should appear. Click on the "+" sign next to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" to expand it, then "SOFTWARE", "Microsoft", "Windows", "CurrentVersion" and "FS Templates". "Desktop", "Mobile" and "Server" choices should appear.

Double-click on "Mobile" to reveal the settings for "NameCache" and "PathCache". Microsoft now says it got these upside-down, that is "NameCache" should be 51 01 00 00 and "PathCache" should be 10 00 00 00. You can correct them by double-clicking on the icon to open an editing window, and enter the new values.

Likewise the settings for "Server" are transposed. Open the editing window and enter a9 0a 00 00 for "NameCache" and 40 00 00 00 for "PathCache". Closing the Registry Editor will save the new values, which will be used the next time Windows is started. This step actually only helps if you also tweak the "Performance" seetings, below.

Open "Control Panel", "System", "Performance", "File System". If your PC has 16 MB or more of RAM, set the "Typical role" to "Network server". Otherwise, leave it at the "Desktop" default. NOTE: It is important to have repaired the registry as above unless you are using Win95B (OSR2), or your machine will actually slow down! While still on the "Performance" tab, set the Read-ahead optimization to Full if you have at least 8 MB of RAM.

Close the File System configuration box and open "Virtual Memory". Select "Let me specify ..." and set the Minimum swap file size to 10 MB. Don't change the default Maximum! You now have, in effect, a permanent swap file, and Win95 will open faster.

Most of the old tricks you used in Win3 will still work also. Performance is improved any time you can free up more memory: don't use screen savers, background images, etc. Open as few programs as possible -- look in the Start Menu's "StartUp" folder and see what various applications have added. Remove as many short-cuts from the StartUp folder as you can.

Forget about the various utilities which claim to increase the effective size of your RAM through compression. They cost more in performance than they gain, and most of them are terribly unstable. Even the old DOS favorite, QEMM, should be dispensed with under Win95.

Keep "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" as small as possible. In fact, Win95 will run quite well without either. If you need certain real-mode drivers for a DOS session, consider loading those in "autoexec.dos" and "config.dos", so they affect only the DOS session. Win95 is faster without them.

Additional Win95 tips have been posted by Creative Element and Stanford University. Help pages for Win95 maintenance, Win95 dial-up networking and Win95 peer-to-peer networking are also available. For more information on personal computer configuration see the supplementary links for my EE:109 class. And don't forget the "seven required updates"!

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