On 7 Oct 99, at 19:21, Brad Loomis wrote:
> Needless to say, having had my HD whirl at times for no apparent
> reason,

Typically this is "prepaging".
When idle, the virtual memory manager writes RAM pages to the
swapfile. Since the system is relatively idle, this has no effect on
performance. If in the future when the system is busier, a
memory page has to be swapped to disk, it can be simply
discarded rather than paged out. This is much faster and overall
performance is improved.

Another cause is typically icon-caching. The windows shell has a
componant called PIFMGR.DLL that traverses the start menu
tree and desktop and caches icons. The default iconcache is
small and when full the PIFMGR will dump the contents and
rebuild the cache. If the number of icons is large, you will have a
continuous slow loop where it builds then rebuilds the cache.
Typically you will see the desktop redrawn during the cache
dump.
To prevent this, increase the default icon cache with this registry
hack.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Explorer]
"Max Cached Icons"="6000"




Gerard R Thomas
Port of Spain,  Trinidad and Tobago
mailto:[log in to unmask]  mailto:[log in to unmask]
PGP Key IDs: RSA:0x9DBCDE7D  DH/DSS:0xFF7155A2

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