Re: How-To List (Properties Settings)

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Brian Henderson wrote:
> Now that IS something I've been meaning to do...post screenshots of the correct Properties settings
> for the various appropriate
> dialogs.

My archival collections include several verbal descriptions of what
properties settings various people found workable.
> btw...speaking of properties settings...the other day, just for the heck of it I went to the Memory
> tab of my Xy shortcut (.pif),
> put a check in both checkboxes, and maxed-out all the number settings.
>
> I then proceeded to open various huge files that I had previously considered beyond Xy's ability to
> handle. One was 8.57meg...just a
> little over what I thought was the 7.4meg max. Another was 15meg! The biggest I could find (without
> looking hard) was 80meg. Xy
> could open it (!!), but it DID have problems getting around inside. Overflow file problems,
> apparently. Anyway, I was shocked. I
> guess now I'll attempt to figure out which of the settings are actually allowing this to happen (I
> believe most of them don't do
> anything on machines that use a DOS emulator). And where the size vs. stability sweet-spot might be.


Very, very interesting. Two things: 1) With large files (e.g., U2
itself), Xy can choke if you try to scroll through them in draft mode
("Cannot continue scrolling; there is not enough memory to perform the
operation" or something like that), but if you switch to expanded, no
problem.

2) The largest plain text file on my system is that humongous inbox
file that Tbird creates: 15,553 K at present. So I just tried to open
it in Xy. It opened, but I got that "Disk is full writing to overflow
file; free up [sic] space on drive D:" message. Which is nonsense, of
course: drive D: is 968 Mb, of which 768 Mb are free. One wonders if
that error message is left over from the days of 360K, or at least 1.4
Mb, floppies? Or 10 Mb hard drives? These are the memory settings of
my pif properties (this is 98SE, so they CAN be set there):
Conventional: Auto (Protected checked)
Initial environment: 1024
EMS: 5120
XMS: Auto (Uses HMA checked)
DPMI: Auto

Once I do all my chores for today, I will try your trick of maxing out
the numbers and see what happens.

Later:

Immediately after closing that Inbox file, I attempted to copy and
paste (using Clip) the next post (Fred Weiner's) from Tbird to Xy. Xy
crashed with a message about attempting to use memory in use by
another program. On reopening it, however, everything was normal. So
it looks as if when asked to open a Very Big File, Xy resorts to some
of the trickery that was very common in its era, of sneaking up past
the 640 K barrier and trying to use some of that spare RAM that most
boxes of that era had, but that DOS couldn't use. (Well, Microsludge
DOS couldn't; Novell DOS 7 did, and that was what TTG ran Xy on).

Still Later:
I then maxed out the memory values and called inbox again. Still got
the disk full message (minimized Xy and took a look in Windows
Explorer; the newest .tmp file was 4104 K), and generally flaky
behavior (an attempt to abort seemed to create a huge RM command,
which Xy couldn't recognize; now with my fumble-fingered typing
anything is possible, but then F5--Clear command line--didn't work
either, so I had to resort to the 3-fingered salute). So I reset my
memory properties to the former values, which have worked pretty well
for some time.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx