[CQ-Contest] Contest/Keyer Software Win95 vs DOS

[Paul M. Elliott]

Just my 2 cents of personal experience on this.  I've run LOGic 5 (Win95)
with the W1GEE keyer interface on both a 486 and a couple of Pentiums.  No
problems with the keyer pausing, as long as you have enough RAM to prevent
most of the swapping to virtual memory that can occur during keying and
logging.  I'm talking about simultaneously running the log with several
thousand Qs, packet with spotting for needed mults, keyer, rotor and rig
control.  24Mb of memory worked fine on the 486, and 32Mb on the Pentiums. 
Anything less doesn't quite do it.  And memory (new or used) has gotten
pretty cheap.

Another trick makes a Win95 logging application (or most others for that
matter) run even a little better.  I picked up a used 120Mb hard drive for
$10 and installed as a second drive.  I changed the location of the Win95
virtual memory file to that drive. It's the only thing on the drive. So all
the logging stuff is on one drive, virtual memory is on the other.  The
head on the logging drive isn't switching back and forth between logging
sectors and virtual memory sectors.  The head on the virtual memory drive
is also right where it needs to be.  The difference in response time vs.
having everything on one drive is noticeable, especially on something like
a dupe check where the needed database record probably isn't in cache
memory.

73 - Paul Elliott N3GPU
Westminster, MD
N3GPU Web Pages http://www.flash.net/~pelliott


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