optimization part deux

[David P. Miller]

Greetings! Ed Sperr's inquiry earlier this week, about "disk churning" when
using Netscape, turned out to be very timely for us. We've just implemented
web-only access to one of our most popular databases, which overnight
turned into our least usable due to the performance of the 486, which is
much like what Ed described. (And yes, -the- 486, only one at present
for Web access in the public area: it's a small place.)

Not to rehash all that, this morning I began to implement some of Robert
J. Tiess' extensive advice. I cleared the cache (added a line in autoexec.bat
to do that automatically), then ran SCANDISK. I got these problems reported:
1) The size of the C:\NETSCAPE\NETSCAPE.HST file is being misreported.
2) The directory entry for C:\NETSCAPE\NETSCAPE.HST is damaged.
	I chose the option for this problem to be corrected.
3) There are 6 lost clusters in 3 chains in drive C.
	I chose the option to delete the data in these clusters.

After SCANDISK performed the complete surface scan (no bad sectors), I
tried to run DEFRAG, but got this response:
	Error, Memory test failed at segment 5DA6.
And that was that for DEFRAG.

I'd like to know what the significance is of these messages. I'm most
concerned about not being able to run DEFRAG, but I'd also like to 
understand the impact of the SCANDISK messages on system performance.

Thanks very much for helping me out with this!

David Miller
Levin Library, Curry College
dmiller at curry.edu