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Cream of the Crop 11
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Cream of the Crop 11-1.iso
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WINFAX7.TXT
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1995-12-28
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5KB
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94 lines
A number of messages have been posted on CompuServe regarding the
performance of WinFax PRO 7.0 for Windows 95. Customer feedback is an
extremely important part of the overall process of delivering quality
products to the market, so your comments are really appreciated and are
always taken seriously.
Our engineers are currently investigating a number of speed issues
(which seem to be radically different for different hardware and
software configurations). We are examining ways to enhance the overall
performance of WinFax PRO 7.0, and we plan to have these changes ready
before the first maintenance release ships.
Delrina has always committed to delivering products to the market
place which support the latest technologies that bring maximum benefits
to our users. In the case of WinFax PRO 7.0, Delrina has taken full
advantage of almost all of what the new Windows 95 operating system has
to offer including features such as support for MAPI, TAPI, Plug and
Play and OLE2. WinFax 7.0's architectural framework supports these new
Windows 95 features and enhancements, adding overhead which in some
cases affects the performance. Since these features were not present in
the older Windows 3.x environments they were not a performance
consideration.
Due to the way WinFax PRO 7.0 is designed to take advantage of
Windows 95, as well as the fact that we have added a significant number
of new capabilities, your performance will vary under different
configurations. Delrina is doing the following to address these
concerns:
1) We are working on a profile matrix detailing expected performance on
a variety of platforms, processors, memory configurations, etc. This
document will be posted here in the new year.
2) As already mentioned, our engineers are currently performing an
analysis of the WinFax code in order to determine what can be done about
making enhancements to the performance of the product. We plan to
release these new code changes on an on-going basis, and post them for
convenient access here.
In the mean time, here is a list of tips and suggestions that will help
improve the performance of WinFax PRO 7.0 under Windows 95:
1) Windows 95 requires more memory than is actually recommended.
Typically, Windows 95 needs about 10MB of RAM to be fully resident.
Anything short of this, means that the operating system will begin to
swap code to your hard drive. Add on top of this, the memory
requirements for WinFax PRO 7.0 (which typically needs another 8MB of
RAM), plus any other applications you're running (like Word or Excel),
and you can see the need for lots of RAM. Adding more memory to your
computer will have the most significant effect on the performance of
Windows 95, including WinFax PRO 7.0. A total of 16MB RAM in your
system is a good starting point.
2) By default, Windows 95 manages virtual memory dynamically. It swaps
portions of code (itself and other applications) out to your hard drive
as it needs to. The problem with this, is that your drive quickly
becomes fragmented, which adds additional performance delays. It is
highly recommended that you configure your system for a permanent swap
file -- a 30MB to 50MB swap file is a fairly good size to begin with. It
is a good idea to defragment your hard drive first, so the resulting
swap file is contiguous. A disk defragmenter utility comes with Windows
95, but you can get a more full featured one from Symantec, Norton Group
-- Speed Disk which comes as part of the Norton Utilities for Windows
95. To make a permanent swap file, launch the System icon in Control
Panel, and click on the Performance tab. Select "Let me specify my own
virtual memory settings" and set the minimum and maximum values as the
same amount.
3) When printing from any application, the entire WinFax application
has to be launched in order to send the fax (even from programs such as
Wordpad). If WinFax is not already loaded, the print command will have
to launch and load WinFax before the send dialog even appears. If you
can afford to, it is a good idea to have WinFax loaded at all times.
This will dramatically speed up the perceived performance.
4) WinFax PRO 7.0 takes advantage of the messaging API in Windows 95,
providing several levels of integration with Microsoft Exchange.
However, if you do not want to manage e-mail within WinFax, you should
disable Microsoft Exchange inside of WinFax. The overhead of
initializing the MAPI DLL's (Dynamic Link Libraries) can contribute
significantly to the load time for WinFax. To turn Exchange integration
off, go to the WinFax Setup menu and select Exchange. Uncheck the box
"Use Microsoft Exchange in WinFax".
5) Cleanup your Startup group. You may be unnecessarily loading
programs in your Windows 95 startup, which will consume system resources
and contribute to the overall Windows 95 performance degradation.
We thank you for your patience and continued loyalty to our products. We
will continue to keep you informed as the process continues.