[WriteLog] Follow-up to WL and MTTY page fault in SARTG contest

[Don Hill AA5AU]

This is a follow-up to a message I sent in reply to William W4RM's original
post.  I got several replies, mostly direct, on things I could look for to make
the HP Pavilion 6646C I'm now using the B radio run faster and better.  The
only real thing this has to do with WriteLog is that this PC is dedicated to
WriteLog as a contest PC and does little else, so I want it to work like a charm.

Being somewhat familiar with PC's, especially running Win98se, I had already
did a lot of things suggested like optimizing the HD with Norton etc.  The one
thing I've done that has seemed to help the PC the most was to get rid of all
the spyware on the machine.  I came up with this one on my own when I came
across a bunch of stuff in the Program Files directory I didn't recognize.  I
did a Google search on them and discovered I had a lot of spyware.

I downloaded Spybot and ran it and found 37 or so spyware programs on
the machine.  Once I got rid of the spyware, the machine started acting somewhat
normal for a 500 mhz processor with 312MB RAM but I'm still not totally
satisfied with it (I still think my 333 Pentium II with 128M RAM ran better).  The
6646C machine has an AMD 6 processor and it's the only non-Pentium machine
I've ever used with Windows so I really don't know if it's the processor or I
still have work to do on the machine.

The only thing I haven't done yet, and hope to do, is to replace the 64M DIMMS
in memory slot 1 with a 128M DIMMS to match the 128M DIMMS in the other
2 slots.  I don't know that will drastically improve performance.  Before I do this,
I want to test the PC in battle this weekend in the SCC RTTY Championship and
see if it reacts significantly better than it did in SARTG.

Running Spybot did significantly improve the performance of the machine after SARTG.
I have to admit I had a little difficulty with it at first but once I figured it out, I was
able to eliminate a lot of Internet JUNK off the machine.  Spybot is freeware software
for eliminated spyware.  I'm not actually recommending it, but it sure helped in my
case.

Comments direct appreciated.

73, Don AA5AU

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Don Hill AA5AU" <aa5au at bellsouth.net>
To: "William Omara" <w4rm at comcast.net>; <writelog at contesting.com>
Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 11:28 AM
Subject: Re: [WriteLog] WL and MTTY page fault in SARTG contest


> First upgrade to MMTTY version 1.65 and see if the problem goes away.
> It's going to be hard to tell now that the contest is over but there's another
> contest in 2 weeks (SCC) and will be a good time to test.
> 
> I had the pleasure of using a new PC in the shack today.  It's an HP Pavilion
> with a 500 mhz Athlon CPU with 312MB RAM.  I've owned it for several
> years but it was the first time I got to use it as a radio PC.  I had to install
> Writelog, MMTTY and the MMTTY plug-in and configure everything from
> scratch.  I did it between the 2nd and 3rd periods in the contest using just
> single transmit/receive with the MMTTY plug-in because I need to install
> more COM ports.  All PC's in the shack run Win98SE.
> 
> The reason I started using this PC was because my older 333 mhz machine
> would lock up and get Rttyrite9 errors when transmitting with the MMTTY
> plug-in.  I had to resort to using a DXP38 to transmit with and MMTTY in
> a 2nd receive-only window.  This setup just did not get it.  MMTTY runs
> circles around the DXP38 most of the time.  I never could figure out what
> the problem was with the 333 mhz PC, so I just retired it.  Believe me, I tried
> everything I knew of and some I didn't, to try to get it work over the past
> year or so to no avail.
> 
> Anyway, the new PC acted sluggish.  Longer than usual steady carriers before
> and after the buffers were sent, etc.  So I started making some changes to MMTTY.
> When I set the Priority to Normal in the TX tab of MMTTY Setup, the PC
> started acting a little better.  My trusty reliable 200 mhz PC on the other radio
> is set for Higher.  I checked the resource meter in the new machine and it was
> showing 59%.  I did a CTRL-ALT-DEL and got rid of everything that did not
> pertain to WriteLog and was not vital such as Explorer, etc.  The resource meter
> only went to 60%, but all of sudden the new machine came to life and was no
> longer sluggish.  It acted just like the 200 mhz PC on the other radio even though
> it has 312MB of RAM (the 200 MHZ has only has 96M).  The 200 mhz machine
> was running 60% also, but had two RTTY windows open, the MMTTY plug-in,
> DXTelnet and Norton virus software.  So something is still hogging memory in
> the new machine.  I will try to find out what it is.  Stopping the Norton stuff helped.
> 
> Conclusions?  Get MMTTY version 1.65.  1.64 had problems with WriteLog.
> Free up resources by closing stuff taking up memory.  Play with the Priority setting
> in the TX tab.  Try disabling your virus software, but that's always risky if you
> are connected to the Internet.
> 
> Damn that was a fun contest, eh?
> 
> 73, Don AA5AU
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "William Omara" <w4rm at comcast.net>
> To: <writelog at contesting.com>
> Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 9:08 AM
> Subject: [WriteLog] WL and MTTY page fault in SARTG contest
> 
> 
> > I was trying to operate the SARTG using WL and MTTY plug-in.  After less
> > than 10qso the program closed and gave me a MTTY Page fault in the
> > WINMM.DLL file.  I upgrade MTTY to V1.64 from 1.63 and still have the
> > same problem.  This time it took about 30 minutes and 15 qso's.  But
> > still the same problem.
> >  
> > Does anyone know if I problem is in MTTY or in my Computer?  WL did not
> > seam to be the problem, just the MYYT plug-in.
> >  
> >             Thanks Bill W4RM
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