22nd May 2000

In California, red means stop, green means go, and yellow means go faster. In that vein, here's a very yellow tip specifically for those of us with cable and DSL modems. You can reserve memory (RAM) for any given IRQ; by increasing the default value for your network card, you may be increasing its throughput and performance. Right-click on 'My Computer' and select its Properties. On the Device Manager tab, press the Properties button (if/when 'Computer' is selected). Note which IRQ your network card is using. Next, open up SYSEDIT.EXE (using the Run command in your Start Menu) and edit the SYSTEM.INI file. Under the [386enh] section, add: IrqX=4096 (where 'X' is your network card's IRQ). Save, reboot, and enjoy! Now, I'm not one for benchmarking, but system speed (overall) hasn't decreased since applying this tweak. Of course, I also have 256 MB RAM.