As for the software, I'm running a 75 MHZ pentium with 48 meg EDO ram, and with my system it shows little difference.
Keep in mind that it is the nature of caching software that the big gains happen the *second* time a section of the disk is read. SuperFassst appears to be doing some read-ahead, but the results of that aren't dramatic. For a very dramatic effect, have SuperFassst running, load Netscape, exit it, then load it again. I think you'll just about fall out of your seat on the second load. Especially if you have (like I do) a LOT of plug-ins.
Netscape isn't a program that's typically exited and reloaded frequently during the day, but I'm sure the demo uses Netscape for an example simply because most people in possession of the demo also have Netscape.
Try the two-load test, and then think what this kind of caching will mean when you're running Access and running many different queries against the same table, or running a game that frequently fetches data off of disk, or repeatedly opening a few Word or Excel files.
This brings me to a somewhat unrelated topic, but it might be helpful to many.
There are two schools of thought regarding leaving the computer on: One side says turning it off reduces power consumption and wear and tear due to heat; the other side (my side) says leaving it on is actually easier on your hard drive because, somewhat analogous to a car engine, most of the wear happens at startup; not while cruising down the highway.
If you use caching software, you'll get the best benefits if you leave your machine on all the time (but turn off the monitor -- if it's not a "green" monitor, it'll suck up a lotta juice). Caching (for the uninitiated) works by storing the most recently accessed hard drive data in a set-aside portion of memory. The more memory you have, the more data can be cached. When the computer requests data, the caching software will check to see if that data exists in memory. If it does, it is fetched from there rather than from the hard drive. That's why the two-load test is necessary. The requested data is not in memory the first time you load it. It is, though, the second time, so the relatively pokey hard drive doesn't get used.
That's a somewhat simplistic explanation of caching (it doesn't cover write-delay, read-ahead, and other more esoteric aspects), but the gist of it is that a really sweetened cache (one that has been in use a long time) makes many computer tasks several orders of magnitude faster than they would be without the cache.
That's why I'm so excited about Windrenalin. Windoze95 is just as appalling as earlier versions of Windoze (which used SMARTDRV as a caching program) when it comes to caching efficiency. To my knowledge, Windrenalin has no competition yet. I could be wrong on this point, though, as I've never shopped for Windoze95 caching programs because I was under the mistaken impression that MSFT was doing a better job of caching with this version of their graphical virus. Errr. I mean "Operating System". *LOL*
I expect Windrenalin to generate ENORMOUS sales. It will be as important for Windoze performance as SoftRAM would've been in 95, if it'd actually worked, in light of the high cost of memory in that year.
My prediction is that Windrenalin will be one of the top 10 selling programs in 1997, based on number of units sold. Caching programs have sold well in the past, and they will sell even *better* now, in part because they will make more meaningful and noticeable use of a lot of inexpensive memory than Windoze can. |
