200LX CF card speed-up TSR?

[Dave Britten]

I remember reading about some TSR for the 200 LX that could speed up CF cards by making DOS cache the results of its free-space check indefinitely (i.e. it wouldn't err on the side of caution and rescan if you, say, power cycled the machine, since you might have removed/replaced the card without DOS knowing it). So, the very long pause you often get when doing a directory listing or launching Filer would only happen the first time, even if you power cycled the palmtop.

Then I think there was a key combo to force it to recheck next time it would query free space. You'd have to be careful and remember to do that if you removed the card, to prevent corruption (which is easy enough; just put a sticker on the card/PCMCIA adapter to remind you).

Anybody know what I'm talking about? I can't seem to find a copy of it (or what it was called).

[Dave Frederickson]

SMARTDRV is the disc caching TSR included with the unoptimized version of MS-DOS 5. Will it not run on the 200LX?

Dave

[Dave Britten]

(06-23-2017 03:38 AM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  SMARTDRV is the disc caching TSR included with the unoptimized version of MS-DOS 5. Will it not run on the 200LX?

Dave

I think that might work, though I've never tried it personally. My gut feeling is that it would gobble up more RAM than would be worth it, particularly because you're rarely working with large program binaries on the 200LX, rather it's usually small data files. For something like a large DataPerfect database (which is a fairly I/O intensive program to begin with), you might see a good improvement.

I found the tool I was thinking of - it's called NODELAY:
http://hplx.pgdn.de

Note that you have to be really careful about running NODELAY /U before swapping CF cards, or you could end up totally destroying the data on the card. I'll play around with it and see if it makes a bigger card/smaller cluster size more livable.

[striegel]

(06-23-2017 11:27 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  ...I'll play around with it and see if it makes a bigger card/smaller cluster size more livable.

Are you using a doublespeed (DS) 200LX? The faster crystal makes a big difference in the overall usability. I've been using them for so many years that I can't remember if I even have any non-DS 200LX'es.

Alan

[Dave Britten]

(06-24-2017 10:36 PM)striegel Wrote:  

(06-23-2017 11:27 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  ...I'll play around with it and see if it makes a bigger card/smaller cluster size more livable.

Are you using a doublespeed (DS) 200LX? The faster crystal makes a big difference in the overall usability. I've been using them for so many years that I can't remember if I even have any non-DS 200LX'es.

Alan

Not currently, but I'd love to get ahold of the proper crystal (and driver) to crank it up.