Wintune 2.0 goes beyond the usual diagnostics and tells you how to fix what ails your system. Take our guided tour to find out what Wintune can do for you.
By Paul E. Schindler Jr.
So you think your system is as fine-tuned as it can be? Don't answer that, at least not until you run the WINDOWS Magazine Test and Tune-Up Kit. See how your system stacks up against other PCs, and how you can improve its performance. Wintune might even help you get things running at up to twice their former speed. What's more, Wintune is free.It's been more than a year since we introduced the first version of Wintune. The new version goes beyond diagnostics and benchmarks. It acts like a personal consultant, giving you advice on how to fix the specific problems it finds while examining your system. Here's an introduction to Wintune 2.0, along with a guided tour of the most important aspects of the program. By the time the tour is over, you'll have the tools you need to add a spark to your system's engine, kick to its fuel and air to its tires.
Most benchmarks simply tell you how well your system works, looking at performance in terms of raw machine power or DOS performance. Those are interesting numbers, but they bear little relevance to how your computer will work in the Windows environment. Your system's ability to do a good job is dependent on a complex series of interactions among Windows, its device drivers and your applications. Any benchmark that doesn't use those drivers the way your applications do won't tell you much about your system's performance under Windows.
Wintune uses the same system calls to Windows that word processors, spreadsheets and databases use when they request access to hardware via Windows. We time the execution of these calls to measure the performance of your CPU/floating-point unit (FPU), your video system (video card and monitor), your hard disk storage and your RAM.
If we stopped with these measurements, Wintune would be just another synthetic benchmark. A synthetic benchmark isolates and measures the performance of system components like the CPU and hard disk. But Wintune also performs applications benchmarks. We determined the proportions of various Windows system calls used in generic word processing and spreadsheet applications. Using those proportions, we adjust Wintune's raw system-call performance numbers then break down the results by system component.
This lets you focus attention on the parts of your system that are most responsible for slowing down your particular application. If your bottleneck is video, you don't need to spend much time tuning your hard disk, and vice versa. Once you've addressed the problems that Wintune points out, you can use an application benchmark (or run your application) to verify that your tune-up had a positive effect.
Once your tests have been run, it's time for you to play an active role in improving your system's performance.
Wintune 1.0 pointed you to a Windows help file full of information culled from WINDOWS Magazine and its contributors. You get even more help with Wintune 2.0. The help files have been simplified and reorganized to make them easier to navigate, investigate and understand. We replaced generic advice with specific, step-by-step tips on how to carry out an improvement and broke the help down into smaller subjects to reduce the amount of material you have to read through to find what you really want.
We also placed our frequently asked questions in a help file to make it easier for you to find the answers. But perhaps the most exciting addition to Wintune is a program called the Tip Advisor. Tightly linked with Wintune, the Tip Advisor takes the information Wintune gathers about your system and offers specific advice on how you can improve its performance.
With Wintune and the Tip Advisor, you'll feel like there's a tune-up expert sitting right beside you, going over your system and telling you how to adjust it to make things run better. The Tip Advisor starts with the Wintune test results, then looks in various Windows and system files to determine the contents of your WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files.
Next, the Tip Advisor offers you specific advice, such as "Increase your cache size,'' "Use a custom video driver,'' or "Create a permanent swap file.'' It also provides rules of thumb for determining settings, offers some typical results, and outlines step-by-step advice on how to implement the tips.
In addition, each tip comes with "Before You Start'' information that suggests precautions you should take to reduce the chances of making disaster-producing changes.
Before you start Wintune, close any applications that are running (except Program Manager). You need to do this because the memory and CPU power used to run background tasks can make Wintune's results less accurate. To make sure you are aware of any programs that may be running in the background, call up the Windows Task List by pressing Ctrl+Esc. Select each task and click on the End Task button to close it.
You may also want to run Wintune once while running any applications in your StartUp group or on the Load or Run lines in your WIN.INI file. If you see a big difference in Wintune results with the background applications running, they may be causing your system's sluggish behavior.
When you start Wintune, an animated arrow will point at the Start button in the lower left-hand corner. Clicking on this button will get the tests running. Few of Wintune's features are available until after you have done the tests.
By default, Wintune runs in Quick Test Mode, checking your CPU/FPU, video, hard disk and RAM. You can do more detailed tests on color and memory by choosing Full Test Mode. To do so, pull down the Edit menu, select Preferences, click on the Tests tab and select Full Test Mode.
Using Full Test Mode, Wintune will check the 24-bit color capabilities of your system. Generally, 24-bit color operation does not affect the performance of mainstream business applications, so this test is not run as a matter of course.
Full Test Mode will also check out your RAM and memory cache by moving 50MB of data into RAM instead of the 10MB used by the Quick Test. Although we do find that moving 10MB of data into RAM produces a sufficient estimate of memory performance, Full Test Mode provides more precise results. (The Full Test can, however, take five times longer than the Quick Test, adding up to several minutes to the tests on some systems.)
In both Quick and Full Test Mode, Wintune waits 10 seconds between each of the tests it performs. This eliminates interference from disk caches or virtual memory that might try to access the disk while a test is in progress. Wintune's results should generally be repeatable to within a few percentage points when you run it multiple times, as long as no other applications are running in the background. However, the disk test results may vary more, particularly on a heavily fragmented hard disk. Wintune results can also be affected by network activity if your PC is connected to a LAN.
To get the most out of Wintune 2.0, try the following hints.
Go after the big fish. Click on the Performance tab on top of the home screen, then on the Application Performance tab on the left side of the performance screen. In the upper-right-hand corner is a drop-down box that allows you to select Generic Word Processor Performance or Generic Spreadsheet Performance. Select the application you use most often. Examine the bar marked Current, which is the system you just tested. After you are through either gloating about or bemoaning your relative performance, concentrate on the width of the bars for your machine. The widest bar is the system component that needs the most work--that is, the area where improvement would yield the greatest benefits in your most commonly used application. If the Tip Advisor did not offer you any tips on this area, select Help/Contents in Wintune and click on the Improving System Performance folder.
Don't fret over small differences. If a coworker's PC gets 34.9 MIPS and yours gets 33.8, that's only a 3 percent difference. It's not significant at all. In fact, most people aren't even going to notice performance improvements of less than about 20 percent without using a stopwatch.
Don't think of tuning as a one-time proposition. Just as your car benefits from regular tune-ups, your Windows PC will perform better if you regularly run Wintune and try the tips it suggests. Also, if you save the results from each run (and name them something meaningful like DAVE'S NOV23 RESULTS) you can see whether your system is becoming less speedy over time. For example, it is a good idea to defragment your disk and remove unneeded files periodically to keep disk performance at its best. Run Wintune afterward to see if your changes helped.
Save your results after every test. There is a WINTUNE.TRF file in your WT20 directory with detailed information about each test you have run, as well as some sample systems to which you can compare your system. You can add to this file using the File/Save Present Test Results in Database command, and you can save a private copy using File/Save Test Results Database As. The latter command also allows you to export the file in a Comma Separated Value (.CSV) format that can be read by spreadsheets and databases. Click on the Comparison tab on the home screen to compare various Wintune test runs.
Read the README.TXT file and the help files that come with Wintune. Wintune 2.0 comes with three fact-filled help files, but you should also check README.TXT, which contains late-breaking information that may not be in the help files.
WTFAQ.HLP is a Windows Help (WinHelp) file with frequently asked questions about installation, tuning and error messages. You can open this file from within Wintune Help by clicking on the button marked Frequently Asked Questions. It is also available as FAQ.TXT on America Online.
WTHELP.HLP is a WinHelp file with information about Wintune itself as well as detailed advice on how you should tune your system. This is the file you open if you select Help/Contents from Wintune.
WTTIP.HLP works with the Tip Advisor and should not be viewed separately, since the tips it contains apply only when certain conditions are detected on your system.
Here's a detailed listing of the pieces that comprise WINTUNE, and their authors.
by Paul E. Schindler Jr.
HELL16.DLL--Low-level performance tests, implemented as a Windows dynamic link library. This module performs tests of your CPU, FPU, disk, video and memory performance using standardized low-level benchmarks. The tests are based on the public-domain Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks, combined with original code written by WINDOWS Magazine senior contributing editor Dr. Martin Heller and editor-at-large John D. Ruley.
GETINFO.DLL--A system information acquisition engine, implemented as a Windows dynamic link library. Called by the Visual Basic front end, this module acquires "static'' information about your system, such as how much memory is installed, whether your hard disk supports 32-bit disk access and so on. GETINFO was written by John Ruley and senior technical editor David W. Methvin of WINDOWS Magazine, with assistance from the other people mentioned here.
TIPADW16.DLL--A unique Tip Advisor engine, implemented as a Windows dynamic link library. This module takes information from HELL16.DLL and GETINFO.DLL, compares it with predefined norms, and emits a prioritized list of indexes into a specially written help file. It was created by David Methvin with assistance from the other people mentioned here.
WINTUNE.EXE--Written in Microsoft Visual Basic, it ties together all the DLLs and help files, making Wintune 2.0 a completely integrated application. It was written by Enis Moran of Graphical Bytes, with assistance from all the other people mentioned here.
WINHELP--Several Windows help files, including WTFAQ.HLP, WTHELP.HLP and WTTIP.HLP. Wintune 2.0 makes extensive use of the Microsoft Windows Help engine to display information, including all output from the Wintune Tip Advisor and a file of frequently asked questions. The help files were generated by Paul E. Schindler Jr., CD editor of WINDOWS Magazine, with assistance from the other people mentioned here as well as the WINDOWS Magazine editorial staff.
WINTUNE.TRF--Information on several standard systems is provided in a file on your disk. This gives you a set of known standards you can compare with your own system's performance. You can either add to this file, or create new files with the results you measure yourself.
Pick up a free copy of Wintune from these services.
by David W. Methvin
Wintune 2.0 is right on this CD-ROM!
This disk contains the latest version of Wintune as of its pressing in January 1996--version 2.0, update 3 (dated June 1, 1995)
Wintune is available elsewhere, but you'll always find the latest version at these officially-supported sites.