At 11:43 PM 3/13/1997  Richard Dennis Smith wrote:
>
> I have a 3yr old gateway 486-66, 8Mb RAM, Western Digital Caviar
>AC31200 ,1.2 gig Hard disk. It is running Win 3.11(WFW) with perm swap
>file 8416 Kb and 3072 Kb cache, Which cache I know is a little large.
>Both 32 bit disk access and 32 bit file access enabled.
>
>The problem occurs mainly in Netscape 3.01, Memory cache 1000 Kb and
>Disk cache 5000 Kb after a few minutes of using it when the hard drive
>runs and runs and only stops intermittently. This also occurs in other
>applications, like my mail client Pegasus.
>
>Sometimes after quite a while the programs just freeze up and I must
>press reset to reboot.
>
>If anyone has any insight into this hard disk behavior and how I can
>fix it with my resources at hand please let me know.


Richard:

My first choice would be to add more RAM. Bring it to 16MB.
Your system is choking, trying to lay everything to virtual
memory (your hard disk).

If RAM upgrade is impossible, reduce your Win3.11 disk cache
to 512K (or even 256K).  Then increase your perm swap to 12MB
(or 16MB if you have the space); paradoxically, you could leave it
at 8MB, or even reduce it, to reduce disk swapping, provided
you aren't multitasking.

Finally, go into Netscape and reduce all the cache settings by half
or more. If you have a fast ISP connection or don't return to a
previous page often, you don't need as much cache here.

Win95 and 32-bit Netscape work much better than Win3.1 and
16-bit Netscape. But more memory is the key.

Regards,

John Chin