On 11 Jun 98 at 20:19, Angus Ching wrote:

> One of my colleague's PC is having a weird behavior. Whenever he
> makes a dial-up to the ISP, his whole system slows down in
> performance tremendously after a successful log-in to the ISP. The
> movement of the mouse is not as smooth during the connection to the
> ISP compared to the movement before the connection. Once the system
> disconnects from the ISP, everything returns to normal.

  Does his modem work in DOS?

  There are some modems out there that rely on the system CPU to do
much of the work that other modems do in hardware.  Many of these are
identifiable by the fact that they cannot work without their
accompanying Windows-only driver loaded.  [I believe "WinModem" may
be a USR trademark, but I've run across similar devices from other
manufacturers.]

> Here's a brief description of the system:
>
> 120 MHz Overdrive Chip
> 16 MB Ram
> Win95A
>
> Could insufficient RAM be the cause of the slow down in performance?

  It's possible; 16 MB *should* be enough, but whether it is will
depend on his mix of applications.

  The OverDrive chip, however, strongly hints that his system is
probably running at 60 rather than 66 MHz (i.e. expect most
peripherals to work 10% slower than designed), and probably doesn't
have enough L2 cache to sustain real 120 MHz CPU throughput very
often.
  In hindsight, I think you could go out today (I don't know when he
bought the chip) and, for the price of the OverDrive, pick up a
pretty decent motherboard (e.g. EFA Viking), CPU around 166/166MMX
rating, and 32 MB or more of RAM.  You'd have to throw in a few bucks
($20-40) to replace a WinModem with a hardware modem, but with a
faster CPU and more L2 cache, you might not notice it.  [This whole
paragraph assumes, of course, that you're not locked into somebody's
proprietary case and motherboard....]

David G