How to Supercharge OS/2 Warp by Richard Oliver Kut CompuServe ID # : 71574,3616 June 24, 1995 Revised September 14, 1995 Standard Disclaimer: (Please read this anyway) **** Please do not try any of these tips without following proper backup precautions. **** Certain names of products and organizations mentioned in this article are trademarks, or are patented or copyrighted. This article has been written by me purely for the purposes of speeding up OS/2 Warp. It has not been commissioned or sanctioned by anyone at IBM, or any other company or organization. It has not been written to generate profit of any kind, and may be freely distributed to anyone, anywhere, so long as this disclaimer accompanies it. In no way am I liable for any consequences arising from the use of the information contained in this file. ================================================================ Scope: Since the initial release of this file I have received a lot of mail from different people with concerns and questions about OS/2 in general. Since I am of the opinion that every OS/2 user deserves to know as much as he/she wants to learn about their operating system, and since there are many first-time OS/2 users who will read this file, I am going to broaden the scope of this paper beyond just performance tuning. The emphasis will still be on performance, and as my own knowledge grows, so will this paper, so watch for updates. Additional sections, however, will be devoted to subjects that I consider of importance to all users. As of today, there will be a new section on how to set up the OS/2 Internet Access Kit to use CompuServe as an Internet service provider. I am also including several separate text files from the UniMaint 4.0 software with the gracious permission of their author, Larry Martin. These texts deal with the Desktop and it's weaknesses, and how to protect yourself from a Desktop crash. If you have ever had to re-construct your Desktop after spending hours customizing it, then this information will surely be of interest. These files will not be absorbed into this document, but will instead be included in the TuneWarp.zip file as individual text files so that they may be viewed separately at any time, and also to preserve the integrity and context of their original text. As well, there will now be a section on some of the best freeware and shareware for OS/2 that I have tested myself. Obviously a very subjective review, but it may at least point you in the right direction. For those with a bigger budget, or a corporate expense account, I will also list some exceptionally good commercial software. Introduction : I have been using OS/2 Warp daily since November, 1994 and I am hooked. I have worked with MacIntosh, DOS, and Windows, and I have never seen power like this. It has truly unlocked the hidden abilities within my computer, and just when I thought that it was getting too slow to be useful. There is, however, one problem. OS/2 out of the box is slower than Windows is. Don't jump down my throat! There are perfectly good and valid reasons for this.First and foremost is the fact that OS/2 offers flexibility, functionality, and power that Windows users can only dream of. Also, IBM has chosen to setup Warp in a default state so that it can be all things to all users. A sound marketing idea, but you don't work with your computer quite the same way as the guy (or gal) sitting next to you. What if you want to customize your OS/2 computer to reflect the way you work? Well, the online books that come with Warp give some hints of where to start, but don't really get to the heart of it all. I have been avidly scouring the bulletin boards for any and all tips that I could get to wring the last ounce of speed from my computer, and you will be glad to know that I succeeded. My OS/2 computers, at home and at work, run circles around any Windows machine I can find. So now I am happy. That is when I realized that maybe my situation was not unique, and that others might also benefit from the knowledge that I had found. This is the result. I have tried wherever possible to write all this stuff in a logical, stepwise, and non-technical way, so that it might be of use to everyone. All the tricks that I describe herein have been used on my computer with great success. If one of these tricks does not work on your computer, please realize that with the infinite combinations of hardware and software sometimes things don't work the same from machine to machine. Essentially, your mileage may vary. Please don't try changing anything about your OS/2 setup without a proper backup. Keeping the above in mind, I hope that you will find the following pages informative, and I hope that they will prompt you to probe the mysteries of OS/2 for yourself. Warp is an amazing piece of software engineering, with great depth and functionality. I always delight in finding out new tricks and short cuts that I can use, and I hope you will too. On with the show! Video : The most important thing about speeding up your existing video card is resolution. Essentially, the higher the number of pixels the video card is asked to display, the more time and computer power will be required. Therefore, if you can live with 640 x 480 resolution, then that would be a much better perfor mance choice than opting for 800 x 600, or higher. Also, the less colors in your display palette, the faster your video response time will be. If you don't need 16.7 million colors, don't use them. Also related to video in OS/2 are bitmapped backgrounds. They may look very pretty on your Desktop, but they are stealing processing power from your computer. Save the nice bitmaps for use as a lock-up screen. Using color schemes that use colors from the mixed color palette will take more time to display than colors in the solid palette. Keep the number of open windows to a minimum. Minimize or close windows that are not necessary, and your screen will refresh faster. Folders that use a "flowed format" will display their icons faster than the standard "non-grid format". This can be changed on the view page of the settings notebook. Also, stick to an 8-point normal text font for maximum display speed. Turning off the Desktop animation will also improve your video speed. Do a right-click on the Desktop to bring up the Desktop menu, and select System Setup. Find the System icon and double-click on it. Now click on the Window tab, and disable the animation feature. The one catch-word that everyone seems to connect with computer video is "screen-saver". OS/2 has a built-in one that you can activate on the "Lock-up" page of the Desktop settings notebook. It has several options, among them the options for a timed lock-up, and to lock-up your Desktop at startup. Both of these are a bad idea from a memory consumption point of view. Activating these options won't slow down your video processes as much as they will affect OS/2 memory use. The timed lock-up fea ture steals working memory away from OS/2, which will slow down all your processes. Turning the "lock-up at startup" feature on will give the computer more program code to crunch through at boot time. Not the end of the world, but still a slowdown. Basically, if you want to lock-up your computer, you are better off doing it manually from the launchpad, or the pop-up menu. One last thing that affects video speed is copying video routines from slow ROM to fast RAM. This is also referred to as shadow RAM. If you are using a machine that has an American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) BIOS, like the computer I use, then you can probably access this feature through your BIOS setup. On most machines, if you hit the DEL key at boot-up time, then you will have access to the BIOS setup screens. Somewhere in there will be references to shadowing video and system ROM. When you find these items, make sure to turn them off. Yes, that's right, I said OFF. The simple reason is that OS/2 has built-in mechanisms to do the same thing as the shadow RAM does. If you don't turn the BIOS shadow RAM off, then you are effectively slowing down the computer by asking it to do things twice. To make matters worse, shadow RAM will take away from the RAM available to OS/2. Memory : Getting OS/2 to really fly is mostly about memory, and how you use it. The more memory OS/2 has, the happier it is. That is the Cardinal Rule. First off, you must realize that just because you are not running a program, that does not mean that it is not consuming memory. Many programs, upon installation, will register program classes and templates with the Workplace Shell. This will increase OS/2 memory consumption across the board. Some examples are the Internet Access Kit, and the IBM Works programs. Therefore, only install programs that you are going to use. Also, most programs will add some statements to your config.sys file, when they are installed. These statements might be in the form of set xxx=yyy, or might load some type of program driver. This driver will sit in memory, occupying valuable resources that OS/2 could put to better use. Again, if you don't need it, don't install it. If you must install a software that you only use occasionally, you could setup several different config.sys files. But that is a topic for another paper, someday. An OS/2 feature that consumes several hundred K of memory are the system sounds. If you can live without all the noise, then find the Sound icon in the Multimedia folder on your Desktop. De-select the sound options. To save even more memory, do the following: open an OS/2 window, change to the \MMOS2\INSTALL directory, type DINSTSND. Now shut down and reboot. This will de-register system sounds from the Workplace Shell and return a few precious K to the operating systems memory pool. Not to fear; all of the above is not permanent. If you want the noise back, do the following: open an OS/2 window, change to the \MMOS2\INSTALL directory, type INSTSND. Shut down and reboot. Open the Sound icon in your Multimedia folder and select the sound options. That's all there is to it. There are many easy things that you can do to speed up your computer and regain some memory. For example, click on the System Setup icon in the OS/2 System folder. Now double-click on the System icon. Go to the tab that says Input, and disable type-ahead. Now go to the Printscreen tab and disable that too. Go to the Logo tab and click on none. There; you have just saved yourself dozens of precious K of memory and sped up your computer in the bargain. If you are a bit more adventurous about saving memory, you might want to reduce the threads parameter in your config.sys file. This parameter controls the maximum number of threads that the operating system will create to run programs. Remember that many OS/2 programs will ask for more than one thread to run, so even though you are only running three programs, they might be consuming fifteen or twenty threads. You don't want to set this number too low or you will run into problems once your programs request more threads than you have made available. Usually you would want to allocate roughly 50% more threads than your maximum (just in case). How do you find out how many threads you are actually using at the moment? The easiest way is to go to an OS/2 command prompt and type PSTAT /C >FILE1. This will create a file called FILE1, which you can then view by typing E FILE1. This file will list all running processes and threads at the moment that you started the pstat command. Therefore, it would be a good idea to be running all the software you regularly run, and then run pstat in order to get a more precise number. In the text file that pstat created you will find a column called Thread ID. This is a column that lists all the thread numbers for each process. Go through the text file and add up all these numbers, and that will tell you how many threads you are using. Now you can add 50% to that, and change the THREADS= line in your config.sys accordingly, and then reboot. Each thread consumes about 512 bytes, or half a K, of memory. Depending how much you are able to lower this number will determine how much memory you save. Commenting out some unused drivers in your config.sys file will also speed up your boot times and reduce memory overhead.By commenting out a line, I mean putting an REM at the start of a line. This is usually safer than deleting the line, because at some time in the future you might need it back. Some easy ones to start with are IBM2FLPY.ADD if you aren't using a PS/2, VW32S.SYS if you don't use 32-bit Windows programs, VEMM.SYS if you don't need expanded memory, VCOM.SYS if you don't use DOS-based communications software, XDFLOPPY.FLT if you don't create extended density floppies, and DISKCACHE if you don't use the FAT file system. If you don't use HPFS, then comment out the line that says IFS=C:\....\HPFS.IFS. You could also experiment with reducing the BUFFERS=xx line in your config.sys file. This line is necessary even in an HPFS machine because it speeds access to FAT systems, and therefore floppies also, since all floppy disks are FAT formatted. I have mine set to BUFFERS=30, and it works great. If you feel comfortable navigating around the files on your hard drive, and don't think you will need the undelete utility, then go ahead and turn it off. Doing so will save some precious memory and a lot of program overhead. Moving, copying, and deleting files will appear much faster with undelete turned off. To turn it off, edit your config.sys file. Find the line that says SET DELDIR=C:\DELETE,512; and edit it to read REM SET DELDIR=C:\DELETE,512;. Now shut down and reboot. If you are only running OS/2 software and don't need the DOS/Windows compatibility, then you can turn them off and recover the 640 K that DOS normally lives in. Edit your config.sys file and find the line that says PROTECTONLY=NO. Change it to read PROTECTONLY=YES. Afterwards, you could also comment out the line that loads DOS.SYS. As always, reboot after any config.sys change. Even if you need DOS/Windows capability, you can still save memory by tuning. The config.sys parameter RMSIZE determines how many K of memory are reserved for the DOS environment. The default is RMSIZE=640, but we all know that most programs can live happily in a 500 K environment. To change it, edit the line in your config.sys to read RMSIZE=512, and then reboot. Voila! Another 128 K for OS/2 and your programs to use. Hard Drive : Your hard drive is an important part of the overall performance of your OS/2 system. Setting it up properly at the start will yield amazing results. The best thing you can do to improve the performance of your existing hard drive is to format it with the High Performance File System, or HPFS for short. This file system replaces the standard File Allocation Table, or FAT, system found on all DOS computers today. It has many advantages and improvements over FAT, and is ideally suited for OS/2. The only drawback is that HPFS requires between 200 and 400 K of working memory. Therefore, using HPFS on anything less than a 6 meg machine is counter-productive. Please note that if your hard drive size is 80 meg or less, that you will not see any measurable performance gain in speed, but you will still have the benefit of resistance to file fragmentation, better undelete capability, and a smaller cluster size compared to FAT which will waste less space on your drive. The following is the best way that I have found to setup your hard drive for machines with 4 to 8 meg of RAM. First, make sure that you have completely backed up your hard drive. Then, when installing Warp, choose the advanced installation. Select to do an FDISK on your hard drive. You will create 2 partitions on your drive: one for the swap file, and one for your files. Create a 20 meg partition, at the start of your disk. Then create another partition for the remaining space. Set this last one as the installable partition. Now, continue with the installation, re-formatting the drive as appropriate. When the install is complete, format your new d: partition. To format your new partition for HPFS you would type FORMAT D: /FS:HPFS. Then edit the SWAPPATH= line in your config.sys file to read SWAPPATH=D:\ 512 16384. Once you have edited your config.sys file, shut down and reboot. You should see a marked speed improvement in swap times. Don't forget to delete the old SWAPPER.DAT file in your C:\OS2\SYSTEM directory after you reboot, to reclaim some disk space. On my 8 meg HPFS system at home, I set aside 34.5 MB of disk space for a 32 meg swapfile. The reason for the 2.5 meg difference is the 512 minimum-space parameter in the swappath= line, and some room for additional structures unique to the HPFS file system. This is also why I had you create a 20 meg partition for a 16 meg HPFS swapfile. One word of caution if you are re-modelling your hard drive with data already on it. BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST! The FDISK program will demolish all data when you resize a partition. If you have the bucks and want to save yourself a lot of headache, take a look at a product from Power Quest called Partition Magic. It will let you do stuff in minutes that would normally take hours, or days. It will also convert a FAT drive to HPFS without re-formatting. If you are running an HPFS formatted drive, try changing the IFS= line of your config.sys file to read IFS=C:\OS2\HPFS.IFS /CACHE:1024 /CRECL:32 /AUTOCHECK:C. The /CACHE:1024 parameter will reserve 1024 K for use by the cache only, so be careful how big you make this number. More than 2048 is useless, and less than 512 is equally useless. If you have an 8 MB RAM machine, start off with 512 and work your way up from there. On an 8 meg machine it will be a balancing act between speeding up your drive and slowing down OS/2, so keep an eye on how much crunching your hard disk does, and how long it takes to access frequently used items. Somewhere in the above mentioned range will be a happy compromise. The /CRECL:32 parameter sets the maximum record size for caching. If most of your files are about 32 K in size, then setting it to 32 would be ideal. You can experiment with this number by adjusting it in 2 K increments, from a minimum of 4 (default) up to a maximum of 64. Another trick to speed up HPFS systems is to specify some additional parameters for the CACHE.EXE program, which regulates all the activity taking place in the cache. Try adding the following line to the end of your config.sys file; RUN=C:\OS2\CACHE.EXE /MAXAGE:7500 /DISKIDLE:60000 /BUFFERIDLE:60000. Okay, now reboot and see if it makes any difference on your machine. On my home machine, with it's humble IDE hard drive controller, my config.sys file is set to run the driver for this type of board. The line starts with BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD. This type of hard drive controller is very common, and if you have an older computer this is probably the board you have too. One easy way to speed up your controller, and therefore your hard drive, is to change the line to read BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD /A:0 /U:0 /LBA, and then reboot. This will enable something called Logical Block Access. I'm not sure what it means, but I know that my hard drive seems a lot faster now. Printing : Just a few words about printing in OS/2. If you want to speed up printing, then edit your config.sys file. Find the line that says BASEDEV=PRINT01.SYS. Now edit it so that it reads BASEDEV=PRINT01.SYS /IRQ. This dedicates an IRQ number to the printer, instead of polling for free IRQ numbers, which is much faster. Also, if you are using your printer to print only one thing at a time, or don't have a printer, then you can save some memory by disabling the print spooler. Go into your OS/2 system folder and go to System Setup. In there you will find the spooler icon. Right click on this icon to bring up it's menu, from which you can disable the spooler function. To speed up printing a bit, edit your config.sys file and find the line that says PRINTMONBUFSIZE=134,134,134. The 134 represents a print buffer in bytes, one each for LPT1 through LPT3. First of all, if you are only using one parallel port, usually LPT1, then set the last two 134 numbers to zero. Don't delete them because they will default back to 134 bytes. Not much memory, but I figure every last little bit counts. Secondly, to speed up printing, change the first 134 to read 2048. CD-rom drives: If you want to speed up the response time of your CD-ROM drive, one way is to make the RAM cache for it a bit bigger. In your config.sys file, find the line that looks like IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS and rewrite it at the end to say IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS /C:4, and then reboot. What this does is change the default setting (/C:2) of 128 K RAM cache to 256 K. Having the bigger cache will hopefully speed up the response of your CD drive. Note, however, that you are stealing 128 K of RAM from OS/2, so this might not be the best thing to do on machines with 8 meg of RAM or less. Miscellania: The MAXWAIT= parameter in the config.sys file determines how many seconds a process will be put on hold before OS/2 will raise it's priority on it's list of things to do. To speed things up a bit, you might try changing this number to 3 or 2, and then reboot. Do not set it lower than 2. This change may speed things up at the expense of more program overhead. In some cases, increasing the number to 4 or 5 might actually help. Try it out for yourself, since every case is different. The IOPL= parameter of the config.sys file apparently gives certain older devices privileged access to the input/output of OS/2 if they need it. This might lead to situations where OS/2 becomes unstable and crashes. Unless you have an older Laserjet printer, you can probably change this line from it's default of IOPL=YES to IOPL=NO. This will make your OS/2 system more stable and crash-proof. In some cases you might want to set it to IOPL=FXPRINT, to use the FaxWorks program as an example, if you have just certain software that requires privileged IO. Many people have said that for FaxWorks to run properly it needs the IOPL parameter set to FXPRINT. I personally have set IOPL=NO and it works just fine. As I said earlier, your mileage may vary. The PRIORITY_DISK_IO=YES parameter in your config.sys file will give hard drive access priority to any program running in the foreground. What this means is that while I am doing a download in the background from CompuServe, for example, and typing this file in the IBM Works word processor in the foreground, the word processor gets priority to access the hard drive. In reality, the download should be getting priority access to the hard drive. My experience has been that setting this parameter to NO makes my system multitask more smoothly than with the default of YES. Try it out and see. Many people have told me that their systems ran more smoothly, and that they had more available RAM, after they de-registered the IBM Works package from the Work Place Shell.You can try this yourself by using a CMD file provided with the works program. At an OS/2 command prompt, change to the IBMWORKS directory. In this directory are two related CMD files. One is named IBMWDESK.CMD, and will register the IBM Works programs with the WPS. The other file is called IWDEREG.CMD, and will de-register all the IBM Works component programs with the WPS. After de-registering you will still be able to use the Works programs, but you will find that their inter-operability will be hampered. If you use these programs as stand-alone software, and don't need to use drag-and-drop between them, then this might be an easy way to speed up your system. If you decide later on that this was not a good idea, then you can always reverse the process by running the IBMWDESK.CMD file, which will restore all the proper links between programs. Please note that after running either file, that it will be necessary to shut-down and reboot in order to finalize all the changes that were made. If you use Warp Connect, like I do, here is something that I found which sped up my networking. When you purchased your network adapter card it probably came with some kind of configuration utility, since most cards don't use jumpers anymore. If you have this software, run it to get the 12 digit alpha-numeric network adapter address. Write this down and keep it in a safe place. Now, when you are installing Peer for OS/2, on one of the notebook pages in the install there will be a field where you can enter this number. Doing so with our network resolved some mysterious crashes we were having, and generally sped things up a lot. If an OS/2 program runs into a problem and will not respond, you should always try the Ctrl-Esc key combination to try and bring up the window list. Doing this, in many cases, will detect a failed application and give you the option to terminate it. Sometimes it might take as long as 1 minute for the system to respond. If this fails, try cycling between Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Esc, as this combination will get a higher priority from the operating system than Ctrl-Esc will. If all else fails,try a "warm boot", which is the Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination (computer version of the Vulcan Neck Pinch ). OS/2 will intercept this key combination and try to close as many open files as it can before actually rebooting. If you reach over and just flick the reset button on your PC instead, then you stand a good chance of corrupting data files, or even worse, corrupting your precious OS2.INI and OS2SYS.INI files. You will also have to endure a CHKDSK upon rebooting. (You should always have a backup of these INI files, and your Desktop, in case of disaster. The best way to do this is to right-click anywhere on your Desktop background to bring up the Desktop menu. Select settings and go to the archive tab. Here you will activate the "create archive at each system restart" option. After you have a few copies archived, you may want to turn this feature off again because it will slow down your boot-ups and take some space on your hard drive.) The reason that programs that were running when you shut down restart when you reboot is because IBM setup the default OS/2 configuration to do just that, on the assumption that people always use the same applications on every restart. You can bypass this by pressing Left Ctrl/Left Shift/F1 as soon as you see the alarm clock when your Desktop starts to load. Keep holding the keys until all the icons have appeared on the Desktop, and then you can let go. If you find that you don't like having your programs restart at every reboot, then you will have to add the line SET RESTARTOBJECTS=STARTUPFOLDERSONLY,REBOOTONLY to your config.sys file. Then reboot for this change to take effect. This will only restart programs that are in your startup folder, and only upon rebooting, not when the Desktop resets itself. One last tip regards the pop-up menu you see when you do a right-click with your mouse. If you know how to move, copy, create a shadow, find, etcetera, then seeing these options quickly becomes an annoyance. To get rid of these redundant items, add the line SET MENUSTYLE=SHORT to your config.sys file and reboot. How to Use CompuServe to Get on the Internet: This is a subject that has received almost no coverage in the press, as far as I know, and yet is so easy to set up. Warp itself will bring you almost all the way there. The Internet Access Kit, or IAK for short, includes a very powerful Mosaic-type browser called Web Explorer. The only other thing you will need are the Point-to-Point Protocol files. Warp Connect includes a PPP program, but you can also get PPP from CompuServe for free. Just logon to the OS/2 User forum and download PPP.ZIP. You will also need to go into the NetLauncher support forum on CompuServe (GO NLSUPPORT) and download a text file in the "CIS and PPP for OS/2" section of the forum. This file describes how to input the proper logon script to get connected to the web. Once you have it all setup and can make all the connections, the first thing you should do is click on the Retrieve Software Updates icon to download the latest version of Web Explorer. The latest version is a lot faster than the one that came in your Warp package, and IBM is publicly committed to upgrading this product continually. Therefore, it's a good idea to click on the Updates icon once in a while. Once you have your machine all setup, try this little trick. Do a right-click on the Web Explorer icon to bring up the menu, and select Settings. At the end of the parameters line add in the parameter -Q, for quick and quiet exit, and -T 8, to dedicate 8 OS/2 threads to cacheing all the images that we love the web so much for. Multi-tasking on the Internet with Warp is something to be seen! In the recent past I've pulled stunts like browsing the Web and ftp-ing a file at the same time through the same connection, or running multiple copies of Web Explorer to access different parts of the Web all at once. Web explorer also supports drag-and-drop, so that you can right-click on an image in Web Explorer and drag it onto a folder or your Desktop and drop. You can do the same with an entire HTML page, but you have to hold down the Ctrl key while dragging. You can also use Web Explorer as a presentation tool and graphics file viewer. Take a graphics file (ie. *.GIF, *.JPG) and drop it onto the Web Explorer window to view it.Pretty powerful stuff, and all this is included free in the Bonus Pack. Wow! Some Software I Use Almost Daily: Here is a list of programs that I have stumbled upon, and consider to be indispensable for my daily work. I realize that this is a very subjective thing to include in what I have tried to make an objective project. However, many first-time OS/2 users may not know what is available, and I include this section in the hope that it may at least point them in the right direction. Please do not view this as an endorsement of any one program over another. I cannot possibly know about every program that exists for OS/2. There are quite literally thousands, not that the Computer Industry Press will ever change their argument that "Warp is wonderful, but there is no software." But I digress. Freeware: One of the best kept secrets in the OS/2 world, as far as software goes, is what is commonly referred to as IBM EWS. This stands for IBM Employee Written Software. Apparently, the highly creative folks at IBM are not allowed to profit from their extra-curricular programming, and all the fruits of their labor are donated to the public domain. Translation: FREEWARE, and lots of it! - If you want to impress your friends who use Windows, go ahead and download the IBM EWS WPShell program. This little gem will make Windows 3.1, or Windows for Workgroups, look just like Warp's Desktop. With that silly cloud background on your Desktop you will be able to fool your friends into thinking it is Windows 95. Actually, if IBM had written this wonderful software a bit sooner, Microsoft could have saved themselves a lot of trouble . It's hard to believe that it's free. - I use the word processor that came in the Warp Bonus Pack. It's compatible with Word, WordPerfect, and AmiPro, as well as regular ASCII text. I find that it works as well as any of the above mentioned software, and it's fully 32-bit and multi-threaded so that it's optimized for OS/2 (and it's free with Warp). - For spreadsheets, I use the spreadsheet and charting programs in the Warp Bonus Pack. It can work with Lotus and Excel file formats, and like all the programs in the Bonus Pack, it supports drag-and-drop as well as object linking. - The drag and drop support for the Phonebook program (also in the Bonus Pack) really helps for doing mail merges or form letters. - I use the FM2 Utilities from Mark Kimes to quick-format my floppies or delete a directory tree, and much more. - To compare two text files I use an IBM EWS called Graphical File Comparison, or GFC for short. I can't explain it, you'll just have to download it and try it for yourself. It has been immensely useful in comparing different versions of the same file. - Since Warp doesn't have a calculator anymore, like version 2.1 used to, I use a freeware calculator for the WPS called HPcalc, which imitates the trusty old Hewlett Packard HP-41C on your Desktop. - For my graphic needs I use Lens, a Desktop magnifier. It's interesting and fun. - PM Camera is an IBM EWS that will take snapshots of your Desktop, partial Desktop, or the active window, and then saves it to a BMP file format. - CvS is a virtual Desktop expander, so that you can maintain several virtual screens full of programs. - A must-have freeware is Config Info. This little gem is a full-featuredconfig.sys information center, editor, and analyzer. It has all sorts of interesting information on the different parts of the config.sys file, and can analyze it in an attempt to optimize performance. I cannot say that I personally agree with all of the recommendations it made for my config.sys file, but it is nonetheless a terrific tool to add to your collection. - I also use KBSet for DOS and OS/2 from Jiben Software. This freeware will let you set the state of the Num lock, Caps lock, and Scroll lock keys in OS/2 and also DOS sessions. - PM Kill, by James R. Skinner, is a Desktop process killer, that some people might find useful. - For you HPFS folks, FENX2 is an IBM EWS that will undelete files on an HPFS drive. - Floppy copying is made easy with PM DCopy, by Jason R. Shannon. - For you engineering types, there is the Unit Conversion Notebook, by Donna Campanella. - I must say that I love XIT, from CodeSmith. It adds a quick exit button to every window you open, allowing you to zap a window with one mouse click. It sounds trivial, but I am sure you will come to appreciate it very quickly, and before you know it you will be hooked. - Paddy's Change Directory, or PCD, is another timesaver that lets you type in a portion of a directory name, and then it will jump there. If it's a choice of several directories, then it will present you with a scrollable list, and you can pick where you want to go. This is a real time-saver if you have many nested directories, or are just tired of typing. - The OS/2 versions of Zip and UnZip, from InfoZip, are indispensable as most files are distributed in ZIP format these days. - Eugene's Icons and Pointers (EUGEICO2.ZIP) are a lot of fun, and I have gotten so used to my new pointer that I could never go back to the one that comes with Warp. - Newpad is a terrific little program that will let you create multiple launchpads. Shareware: All the files mentioned in this section are shareware. Please register them if you will use them on a regular basis. Without your support these programs will not continue to exist. - The best investment I ever made was for the SIO drivers, from Ray Gwinn. These drivers replace the COM.SYS and VCOM.SYS serial port drivers that come with Warp. SIO cured a nagging problem I had in DOS sessions with AutoCAD 12c2 for DOS (my bread and butter) randomly crashing the DOS session. Since I installed them I haven't had one crash. - For modem communications I use Zap-O-Com, or ZOC for short, which is a terrific software with lots of intelligence built-in to automate logons and such. - When I do a download, it's usually in ZIPped format. For zipping and unzipping I use the InfoZip freeware products (available on every BBS I have ever seen) and the WPS frontend, RPF Zip Control, another excellent product. - PMJPEG is a terrific graphics file viewer/converter for almost all file formats you can think of. - PMDMatch will let you compare two drives or directories to see if all the files match. It also has built-in functions for moving, copying, and otherwise managing the files in it's display. - DirMaster is a very good file manager. I don't use it because I prefer the object-oriented, drag-and-drop approach of the file manager that comes with Warp. I have tried it out, however, and it works very well. Commercially Marketed Software: These programs are all available through mail-order companies. I purchased them from either House of Technology, or OS/2 Professional magazine. Both companies have knowledgeable people manning the phones, and offer all kinds of software that you probably would never find in any computer store. - The GammaTech Utilities, from SofTouch Systems, are terrific for basic housekeeping of your hard drive. They include a great set of FAT and HPFS tools, as well as disaster recovery tools, and I use them almost daily. - To monitor my resources, drives, the number of threads and files usedand connections, I use a utility which has become indispensable called PM Patrol. It also includes a program scheduler so you can start backups after regular hours, for example. - To keep my INI files clean as a whistle I use UniMaint, also from SofTouch Systems. This software also comes with a program un-installer that will remove anything from your drive that relates to a given program. This is also where the text files came from that I have included separately in this revision of TuneWarp. - To manage my disk partitions I use a great new product (someone should have invented this years ago) called Partition Magic, from PowerQuest. It works in DOS and OS/2 and does in minutes what used to take hours. Another amazing feature of the program is that it can convert an existing FAT partition to HPFS on the fly without losing data or having to re-format.If you have ever had to monkey around with partition sizes, or want an easy way to try out my suggestion in the Hard Disk section of this file, then this product is for you. Conclusion : I hope that all of the above tips worked for you. This has been my first attempt at doing something for the OS/2 community, and I plan to update this file from time to time as I learn more tips and tricks. From the figures that I have seen, there are now more people using OS/2 than there are using MacIntosh computers. That's really something great. The OS/2 community is finally a force to be reckoned with, and you can see for yourself by the number of version 1.0 programs coming out specifically for OS/2 that 1995 promises to be a banner year with all kinds of new developments. I have been able to garner the above tips from many diverse sources. If you want to inform yourself further about OS/2 and all of it's wonders, there are many channels open to you. You can read about OS/2 in OS/2 Professional, OS/2 Magazine, as well as OS/2 Developer magazine. CompuServe has several forums specific to OS/2, and OS/2 software vendors, that you can access for support 24 hours a day. I have asked for help there several times, and gotten knowledgeable answers usually in less than 24 hours. There are many OS/2 specific bulletin boards that you can call for shareware and other stuff. Lastly, there is the Internet with it's wealth of information. My tip to you would be to check out CompuServe first for whatever you need. They have powerful search tools which make almost anything easy to find, and all the files are virus-free. With all of those resources you should be able to satisfy almost all of your OS/2 needs. Happy Warping! Richard Oliver Kut CompuServe ID #: 71574,3616 June 24, 1995 Revised September 14, 1995 Text file revised September 28, 1995