ReOrg
If you are brave enough to defrag your harddrive, then the best programme
to use is Reorg 3.11, This great utility can also help speed up the rate
that icons appear in a window, this is done by setting the WORKBENCH MODE
tick box before you start the defrag process.
I found that the icon drawing was as fast as if I was using a large hard-
drive cache, ReOrg does this by placing all the icon data together on the
disk and enabling the Amiga to read the icon data stream quickly without
having to search all over the drive for scattered icon data.
PLEASE NOTE READ ALL DOCUMENTATION BEFORE USING THIS PROGRAMME, AS MIS-
USE WILL DESTROY DATA ON THE DRIVE.
Please back up data on a partition before you use ReOrg or any other defrag-
mentation utility.
LowFrag
Sometimes you may find that a programme returns a NOT ENOUGH MEMORY message
when you seem to have plenty of spare RAM. This is because the programme
requires a continuous block of free memory and if other programmes are or have
previously been running, this can be cause fragmentation (break up) of the
memory into smaller portions.
A utility called LOWFRAG can help reduce this problem and works well.
Harddrives
In Harddrive Toolbox you can change the block size when partitioning a drive
increasing the block size may speed up data transfer rate but can waste disk
space as only one file can occupy a block.
Normal block size is set to 512 bytes but it can be increased to 1024, or 2048,
or 4096 do not go above this as there is a bug in the file system which was
fixed in v40.4 but this was never released.
The drive partition buffers are also set in HDToolbox but do not increase
this to over 30 as it is counter productive this is because the search
routine will take longer to hunt through the buffer than the drive.
Boot Partition too small.
After a while the WorkBench or Sys becomes full. What can you do?
Delete file, Repartition drive or compress the files, all rather drastic so try
this first.
Copy fonts drawer to another partition eg. WORK delete most of the fonts from the SYS fonts drawer except the ones that WorkBench uses eg. Topaz (see fonts Prefs).
Then add this to User-startup :-
Assign Fonts: Work:Fonts
Requesters
It is possible to drag and drop icons into a Standard Amiga Requesters which then auto loads the file.
No RTC
If you haven't got a Real Time Clock (RTC) and would like to know how long you have used the computer since the last reboot, add the following line to your 'user-startup' file eg.
DATE 22-JUL-98 00:00:00
The first part of the date command (22-JUL-98) is not used in this case but the following part (00-00-00) sets the clock to zero on boot up, thus if you now put the 'Clock' icon from the 'Utilities' drawer and put it in the 'WBStartup' drawer, the clock will also start on boot up.
Once booted you can adjust the clock via its pull down menu to 'Analog' in the 'Project' menu and 'Digital format' in the 'settings' menu, chose the last option (16:00:00), and remember to save settings.