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Mar 4, 2002, 4:47pm

As a Mac user I'm used to optimise my OS to run certain apps as fast as they
can by removing extensions (they are like DLL's).

Does anyone have any tips on tuning my DELL Win2k machine to run Active
Worlds? I would love to hear ALL your findings, I might just stick em all on
a webpage.

I'm new to Windows but would like to know:
- does it help to have lots of memory or is this a waste of money?
- is there stuff I can take out of windows to tune it?
- does Active World perform best at a certain aspect ratio or does this not
make any difference? (digital movies like mpg's have an optimal ratio of
compression and playback).
- on the settings for the nvidia card I can allocate more system memory to
the texture buffer, what does this do?. What's best?

Basically I want to squeeze any extra frame I can add to the overall frame
rate out of my machine.

Be heard people!

Gerard

Mar 4, 2002, 5:58pm

Um, get a great video card, get a lot of RAM. That's basically the only
stuff you can do to increase your framerate. Maybe defrag and scandisk a
little? Mac's and PC's have some differences in the way they run.

-Silenced

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Mar 4, 2002, 6:03pm

> I'm new to Windows but would like to know:
> - does it help to have lots of memory or is this a waste of money?

Memory is relatively cheap and can do a LOT for your computer. I would
suggest 256MB of memory. Anything after that is pretty useless.

> - is there stuff I can take out of windows to tune it?

Take out? Err... tune it? I don't get it.. LOL, you can't modify it to go
faster or anything if that's what you mean.

> - does Active World perform best at a certain aspect ratio or does this
not
> make any difference? (digital movies like mpg's have an optimal ratio of
> compression and playback).

The active worlds compression and all that is pretty permanant. Even if it
did get better, I dunno how you could do anything about it.

> - on the settings for the nvidia card I can allocate more system memory to
> the texture buffer, what does this do?. What's best?

Depends on how much system memory you have left to screw around with.

Mar 6, 2002, 9:44pm

I'm no mac user.. However, since you say you can remove extensions (like
DLL's) to tune your apps on a mac. I'd recommend not playing around with
your system DLL files (on a windows machine) too much ;-)

A little programming info..

DLL stands for Dynamic Linked Library. When you write code for windows it
is inherently complex. To simplify things programmers came up with the idea
of "libraries". A library is simply a collection of reusable code. For
example, in C++ (the defacto / arguable best high level language) you can
include things like "sting.h", "math.h" and "stdlib.h". All of which are
prewritten chunks of code designed to help accomplish a specific task. The
string.h file makes available several functions for the handling of strings
(a string, in programming, is any set of characters set off by quotation
marks) The math.h file holds many functions for doing advanced math (roots,
square roots, powers, squares, trig, log, calculus, etc..). And finally
stdlib.h holds many standard functions that just come in handy for different
things.

The magic comes when you actually make your program from your code
(compiling). The compiler you use (CodeWarrior, MS Visual C++, etc) has to
change your C++ code into assembler and then into hex code so the computer
can execute it. In the process of doing this it has to "link" the libraries
to the code.

There are two ways of "linking": static and dynamic. When a library is
statically linked the compiler includes the library in with the program. The
library essentially becomes part of the program. The result is usually one
".exe" file. When a program is dynamically linked the library is compiled
separately and placed into a DLL file. The result being one ".exe" file and
(usually) several ".dll" files.

When the operating system executes (runs) your program it has to load the
libraries in one way or another. If they are statically linked then they are
loaded when the program code is loaded, and stay loaded until the program is
exited (and possibly beyond). A dynamically linked library is not
necessarily loaded when the program is loaded. Windows dynamically loads
the library whenever it determines the program needs to use it, and can
unload it after the program is finished using it. This way frees up memory,
and is supposed to offer some performance boosts.

Thus, removing DLL files under windows, like removing extensions on a mac,
is not really possible. Your program will not run without all it's DLL
files. (As I imagine you've found out once or twice before with those nasty
little "Missing file blah.dll" messages)

Hope I've explained it pretty well.

As was previously said... Best thing to do is get a GForce 4 and a gig of
ram.. hope for the best. ;-)

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jeremy Booker
JTech Web Systems
(www.JTechWebSystems.com -- Coming Soon)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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