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[ Go to March 1997 Table of Contents ]
News
-- Some of you hard-core Wintune fans discovered that America's favorite utility gives some weird SCSI disk performance scores. Here's why. SCSI adapters have their own cache to augment Win95's cache. Since Wintune can only turn off the Windows 95 cache, a SCSI drive will always appear to have anemic uncached disk speed, especially compared with IDE drives that don't have hardware cache of their own. Besides, most SCSI controllers have read cache but not write cache turned on. To get numbers more comparable to IDE drives, you should use the software or BIOS setup for the SCSI controller to enable both caches when doing any testing. After the tests have been run, you might want to leave both forms of cache enabled to improve performance. Remember: With write caching enabled, the data is not committed immediately to disk. If there's a power outage, you'll be left in the dark. -- Reviewer John Yacono recently discovered a way to make a floppy that'll boot the Windows 95 GUI in case the root directory gets infected with a virus. Create the startup disk using the button under Control Panel\Add/Remove Programs\Startup Disk, then unhide and copy MSDOS.SYS from your usual boot drive to the diskette. -- A couple of PCs here recently contracted the Stealth_C virus. In the past this wasn't scary-in a Win 3.1x system, it merely propagates between boot drives. However, in Win95 and NT it's very serious: It infects the boot volume of a Win95 PC, which can appear as a problem in the IDE controller under Device Manager. It can prevent the booting of NT, even if the infection is not in the active boot partition. After kernel initialization, NT will terminate with a blue screen and the error INVALID_BOOT_DEVICE. Fortunately, you can boot NT with the infected drive installed. Set up another boot drive, or move the infected drive to another system and run any antivirus software to clear the infection. Pop it back into the system as the boot drive, and you're done. Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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