Electronic Reviewer

Puttin' the Peddle to the CD-ROM Metal

The computer store shelves are full of those 8X CD-ROM upgrades, but, oh, how they cost! If you don't have the bucks, you might try one of the software-only accelerator products on the store shelves. The products include Blitz 'n' Software's CD-Blitz, Casa Blanca Work's DriveCD, Insignia Solution's RapidCD, Lucid's LightningCD, and Ballard Synergy's d-Time 95.

Depending on the other hardware you have, these products may offer from two to ten times the read speed using your current CD-ROM drive. The best product we found was the Ballard Synergy d-Time 95 program. It offered up to ten times improvement in speed with DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 95 applications.

All of the products work by reading the CD-ROM and caching the results of the 'read' for future use on the screen, or as program control code. The d-Time 95 product is different from many others in that it is a hard disk cashing program rather than a RAM cashing program. RAM is more expensive per megabyte of storage than hard disk space. If your system is really a 'technoantique', you may find it harder to upgrade the RAM than the hard disk space.

The d-Time 95 program offers two ways to install the package. You can opt for the automatic installation, and the package will perform automatic tests on your system before it sets its caching parameters. The custom installation allows you to review the results at each step and make decisions consistent with your intended use of the package. The system takes 20 minutes or more to install because it also defragments your hard disk.

The use of software instead of hardware always raises theoretical software issues. The market also offers software-only solutions for too little RAM and too little hard disk space. You cannot use these software options on one system and have any overall system improvement. In some cases, the simple use of a RAM compressor and a CD-ROM accelerator may cause your system to lock-up. With d-Time 95, a disk compression program like the popular Stacker package will reduce the overall speed improvement you could expect without Stacker.

The d-Time 95 program establishes a 20-30 Mb hard disk cache. You will notice that the first starts of any program seemed slower than later starts of the same program. The program develops a 'Timelog' for each program that helps it understand the typical track-to-track usage of the program on its CD- ROM.

Re-booting the computer after each CD-ROM based program made each operate faster. This saves the program from searching the cache for areas not used by the last running program. In general, programs that had to search the CD-ROM for information, such as a reference encyclopedia or dictionary, had greater speed improvements than multimedia programs with a single program path for the user to follow.

If your reason for purchasing the program is to run CD-ROM DOS based games faster, you may be disappointed. First, the program uses memory your game may need to function or operate at its most efficient point. Even if the game has enough memory to run, we found some did not know d-Time 95 was present, and the system locked-up. Finally, d-Time 95 will only function for DOS programs when you use the MS-DOS prompt from within Windows 95. Exiting Windows 95 to gain extra memory through the 'shut down' command also ends d-Time 95's speed improvements.

Contributed by C. W. Mann, who also writes the syndicated computer column, BuzzBytes. Please direct your personal computer questions to him at cybercast@bogfoot.com.

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