Let me know what you think of my tips, and if you have any I haven't included, please let me know about them.

Cruncher

There is one is with SetiSpy 2.5.2 and using MS-ramdisk driver, and one with SetiSpy 2.4.4 and RamDisk98. Check them out here:http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/jerrya_sj?d&.flabel=fld11&.src=bc

You're welcome

It took me a while to get this all sorted out, and it's rare info that takes work to find (along with computer knowledge and experience).

I figured one-source documents would be helpful to newcomers to computing and www.3DNOW.ORG SETI members.

I saw on some of the other forums some back-and-forth on these very tips that I posted.

It's hard to tell people how to do these tricks and tweaks over a chat forum.

I was thinking how long the text would be if I posted the pages here on this forum. The text version of what I came up with is 6 pages long in Word..

It's too long, took too many words to summarize the steps. The page on this forum would go for 6 pages by the time I posted it all.

www.3DNOW.ORG members who want a quick tutorial can now just click on the link above and go right to it on the web, print it out, etc.

Added a trick for automating the process priority change to the SETI client in Windows 98 (no more manually using TaskInfo 2000 in Windows 98 to set the process priority!)

Also some changes to how the SETI client loads at startup.

Changes to the config.sys file to make the ramdisk run a little smoother in Windows 98.

It's all good! It's, it's, it's a jiggy-baby!

In Windows 98 you have to manually kill the text-client window anyways before Windows will shut down. Windows 98 doesn't control programs as completely as Windows NT and Windows 2000 do (especially programs written for Windows NT), and Windows 98 gives error messages about being unable to close the program automatically. That's why Windows 98 will hang up if you don't kill the text-client before you shut down Windows.

The one-step backup/shutdown batch instructions I posted need to be run *after* manually killing the text-client in Windows.

If you want to do complete ramdisk backups of the SETI folder occasionally thoughout the time you have Windows running, you have to manually kill the client, then run the backup batch file, then restart the client. It's a pain, but this is the only way I know of to get around the "lock.sah" sharing violation error message in Windows 98.

If anybody knows of a way using programming to get around this process, I'd love to hear it.

Did you catch the trick about upping the process priority to Normal automatically on Windows 98 boot up? Pretty neat, huh.

Hope this helped

Crunchmeister

Check your batch file command for the ramdisk backup batch file. Make sure the line is exactly this: copy g:\seti\*.* c:\seti /Y

Don't leave out the /Y

That switch tells DOS Copy command to "Suppress prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing destination file". In other words, DOS Copy will auotmatically overwrite the existing files in your backup folder on your hard drive.

This should work to automatically back up all the files in the ramdisk SETI folder *except* "lock.sah", which is the text-client memory lock file that Windows can't overwrite while the text-client is active.

All the other SETI data files will be able to be backed up with that batch command while SETI runs except that one.

To back that one up you have to kill the text-client and then run the ramdisk backup batch.

That's what I thought you were talking about before when I first read your post (I read it too fast and misunderstood what you were saying )

Let me know if it still gives you trouble

Crunchy the Clown

man I'm screwing up all over the place today.. tgif.. what a week its been

be careful *not* to use this line *exactly*: copy g:\seti\*.* c:\seti /Y

the drive letter in it (g is *my* drive letter, not yours!

be sure to change that drive letter to correspond to *your* hard dive letter!

I hope the weekend is better than this week has been

Crunchy

copy g:\seti\*.* c:\seti /Y

g: is my drive letter, replace g: with your drive letter

I'm going to bed now

g'night

Disregard the previous instructions for creating the backup batch and one-step shutdown/backup batch file. The instructions from this day forward are the best to use. Sorry about the bugs that popped up in the previous instructs

update is here:
http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/jerrya_sj?c&.flabel=fld12&.src=bc

keep on crunching

cruncher

You might also want to add something about SetiDriver, a very good gui caching client for cl Seti. You can check it out at http://home.sprintmail.com/~obermd/SETIDriver / On my k6-iii, Task Manager reports that it's only using 640k and has used zero seconds of processing time in the last hour. Very slick.

SetiDriver also has some other features. It runs in the tray and hides the client from the taskbar (more desktop real estate!) ... and, for the multi-processor hogs, it allows you to run multiple instances of Seti ... again w/o taking up taskbar space.

Caching WU's is a very good thing. A few hours w/o anything to process defeats many tweaks to shave a few minutes off processing time ...

Masoch

Hey we passed Team Poland up, huh. Anandtech is next on the list!

Keep on crunching

Cruncher

I'm seeing on some sites that they recommend using the i486 client for anything AMD.

I was running the i386 client on my Athlon box and it ran fine. I downloaded the i486 client and tried it out and guess what, it works fine as well.

What gives

I'm going to take them apart and see if I can see the difference..

It came out pretty good, and now I'm sorry I didn't just do them in html to begin with, 'cause it was a lot easier to do in .html than it was using M$ Word and Office 2K to do it in .DOC format, let me tell you!

I found a bunch of mistakes (er, erratumnotbugs) in the .txt and .docs I had posted before today.

Some of the steps you have to follow to get this to work under Windows 98 make Chinese trigonometry seem like child's play. I'm not a technical writer by profession, and that's what I've been doing to post these instructions, and after doing it a few times, all I can say is I wouldn't want to do it for a living!

If that link above didn't bring the .html file up for you, here's the directory on Yahoo where the file is:
http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/jerrya_sj?c&.flabel=fld12&.src=bc

It looks like I fixed all the erratumnotbugs, but if anybody finds mistakes I missed, or finds something that didn't work for them, give me a holler.

Cruncher