Trick I found out to make prompt box progs respond FASTER in WinXP

[Jüš† ä gü¥]

Okay...okay....I found this out by accident, but the reasoning makes PERFECT sense

As you all are probably painfully aware (Well, some of you anyway), the prompt box feature of WindowsXP which replaces the MS-DOS box feature of earlier Windows OSes is painfully slow. ...it is much MUCH slower than those in previous versions.

Well, sometimes I like to edit/70 a file and read through it really quickly by holding the PageDown key, but that is SOOO SLOW! It's like MOVE IT already!

Anyhow, as soon as, while I held the Page Down key down, I started moving the mouse around over the prompt box, BINGO! ....all of a sudden there was like a 10X speed increase

Now whenever I am using a program that is a prompt-based program, I just move the mouse around in the prompt box as it runs and it makes it run a LOT FASTER!

I am pretty sure the reason this is so is because Microsoft gave the prompt box LOW thread/task priority (They're hoping you won't be using too many DOS programs, see?), so therefore, it seems that it gets unduly slow. However, once you move your mouse over it rapidly, Windows sends a bunch of WM_MOUSEMOVE messages to the prompt box program

In a nutshell unless your program actually uses mouse input, these tell the DOS box "get a move on, little doggie"

Hence, for those of you using WindowsXP, but that also like to use a lot of DOS programs as well, just move your mouse around in that prompt box while the program is running

Lemme know if this helped anyone

BTW.....you can test this out for yourself by taking any sufficiently large file (which is still small enough to be opened with the edit command), open it with edit/70

....and then hold the PageDown button and see how slow it goes, and then start moving your mouse around a lot in the prompt box while holding PageDown and witness the HUGE improvement

BTW, I just figured this out now, so

Credits to me if you want to post this on any website.

[Droppyale]

Nice to know J-A-G.

Thanks

[vass0922]

edit/70 what is the /70 part? 'edit' works just the same as 'edit/70' and I don't see any flags in the help that would require '/70' ...

[NeoStarO1]

I dunno about that, I have XP and there is no slowness with my CP window. makes not a liketiy splitin difference if mouse is in or not. Page down goes fast.

ya i have to agree with Vass using edit works just fine, never heard or seen the edit/70 part.

[Jüš† ä gü¥]

Originally posted by vass0922
edit/70 what is the /70 part? 'edit' works just the same as 'edit/70' and I don't see any flags in the help that would require '/70' ...

The /70 command line switch allows the edit program to align characters on 70 column boundaries (and since you can only see a max of 78 characters there anyway.....and I kinda like a little extra space.

You can actually use a slash and then whatever number you want to get that type of column alignment.

Two other benefits of using edit/70 as opposed to just plain edit with no flags is that it allows the edit program to load certain files that it would not otherwise be able to load because they were too large for memory requirements (although you can still get files too large for even edit/70), and the second benefit is that you can see the ASCII code (well, IBM Extended ASCII, technically) in decimal for the character which the cursor is currently on in the lower-right of the screen.

This is very useful for me.

....and as for NeoStar.......you've probably got a lot of RAM, don't you???

Perhaps try it when you have a LOT of programs running then, in the case that you have a lot of RAM