I'm running a DOS/Windows for Workgroups system (P150, 48mb). I have made a multiboot menu so I can boot into different environments with ease, depending upon what I need. My question is, what should my SMARTDRIVE RAM cache settings be for DOS games and what should they be for booting into WFW? Currently, I think I have it set as.. C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.exe 8192 128 -- for DOS/DOS games & C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.exe 1024 128 for Windows for Workgroups Any help appreciated.

Well, the old DOS622 defaults for machines with 6 Mb or more was 2 Mb. On modern systems you could leave it at 2 or so (I use 4) - it really won't matter that much, you can certainly go higher, depending on the game. The old DOS 'Blood' needs about 32 Mb of free ram to run well. It makes no sense to specify a second setting for Win3xx - this was originally done back when most machines had a very limited amount of memory (and Win31 was considered a real 'hog'). Certainly a 128K smartdrv cache is fairly tiny - I'd just use one setting for both, you should see some improvement in WfW.

Just to clarify, here's my DOS622 smartdrv configuration c:\dos\smartdrv 4096 /n /q /b:32 a+ This sets the cache at 4 Mb for DOS & Windows, the 'n' waits until the system is idle before writing, the 'q' suppresses status messages, the 'b' is buffer size and the a+ ensures that drive a: is write cached (as well as read cached) - probably not all that is necessary nowadays, machines are so much faster, you could probably be just fine with something like c:\dos\smartdrv 4096 a+ Parameters for this and lots of other DOS syntax can be found in the old 622 'help' program.

Thanks for the info. But I've also read that Windows for Workgroups uses it's own RAM cache and so I shouldn't use smartdrv for WFW, only DOS. Any ideas?

Right, you must be referring to vcache - honestly, I'd completely forgotten about that. I believe you need to have 32 bit file access on, vcache is 32 bit. On my Pentium 1, even with 32 bit mode off & using smartdrv, WfW ticks along pretty quickly :) Some info about vcache here and 32-bit access here. hth