Author: William Kerr
Date: 07:27:35 07/31/99
After installing a program on my computer (not a chess program) from one of the XXXXX for Dummies book series and. When running Fritz32 I noticed that its nodes per second speed was less than halve its normal value. I ran the program Wintop and discovered a system program called 'windrive.exe" that was sharing processor time with any application run under Windows 95. Windrive took all available cpu time even if the disk was in-active. You could not delete the windrive task because it was a system program. When restarting the computer, windrive would run automatically always taking all available cpu time. Sometimes there would be two copies of windrive running and both taking up cpu time. If you ran your application it would receive only 33% of the cpu time if lucky (the 2 copies of windrive would receive 33% each). I ended up finding windrive.exe in the Windows directory (or maybe the windows\system directory) where I renamed the file. I re-booted the computer and window 95 did not complain that it could not find the windrive.exe program. Now any application that is run gets nearly 100% cpu time as it should. My son downloaded a program from one of his game sites and again windrive ended up running in the background. Again the file windrive was deleted from the windows directory. No complaints from any programs or from windows that windrive.exe does not exist if and when windows goes looking for it. Bottom line of this post is if you are running windows 95 I strongly advise you to get a free copy of wintop from the Microsoft website in order to ensure that your applications be they chess programs or whatever, that they are getting nearly 100% processor time. If you suspect that your chess programs or any other programs are running slower then thay should look for a program called windrive.exe and rename it so it does not run. If you ever need it you can get it back. Happy fast computing! Bill
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