Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:08:32 +1000, da Silva, Joe wrote: > I realize that ISA (or VESA, if your 486 supports it) serial > cards may be hard to find these days, but you really should > try to get one with a 16550A or equivalent UART. If you can, > this should not cost very much (typically A$5-20) and will Last time I enquired (last year) they were over Aus$50. And I haven't heard of any secondhand ones. But I shall look again. > main problem here, just your UART. Alternatively, if your > serial card has a 40 pin socket, you may be able to buy > a 16550A UART for it, although these actually cost more > than a new card (last time I checked). Ha! I wish. I have accumulated four or five serial cards and they all have the chips soldered in :-( > A simple experiment you can try is to set your baud rate > to 9600, then dial your ISP and try downloading HTML pages. > You will find that stalls are far less frequent than with higher > baud rates and your download time will actually improve! Of > course, downloading other files will be slower, but I'm talking > about the HTML problem. You may be right, but with my system running at maximum speed, I can download the freelists Main Menu page (about 120kbytes) in 1 min 18 seconds, under MS-DOS. "Par for the course" with my system is usually about 100k/min. Under OpenDOS, a download of a 12k page took over eight minutes without getting to the 60% mark. If you think changing back to 9600 will help, and it's not just a wild guess, then I'll try it, but I have to remind you that everything I try means at least one more dialup to reconnect, which costs me money!!! > Again, I'm not sure about your claims concerning M$-DOS > (was this with the same hardware, drivers, TSR's, Arachne > settings, etc., etc.?), but if true, is remarkable and M$ should > be commended for such performance. What claims did you find so remarkable? I haven't kept the original message, so I can't be sure what you are talking about. But MS-DOS 6.22 is widely known as one of the most stable of MicroSnot's platforms. I hope you don't judge it by the performance of Win9x and later. My current setup is with minimum TSRs. See my reply to Michael H. Tyc for details. Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --