I really need to used Speed Doubler because it make my mac faster with noticable different. I contact Connectix but they are too busy to reply to my email. I want to know when will they released a version that will work with MacOS 9. Same thing with Ram Doubler 8 too.

hi,
i'm kinda surprised you see such a boost from speeddoubler. i haven't used it recently, but from what i recall, it wasn't _that_ much faster than normal for most stuff, unless you do a _lot_ of non-native stuff. before 8.5 parts of the os were 68k, and speeddoubler would have helped there; since then the os has been native, and speeddoubler's faster 68k emulator wouldn't have very much impact. i used it on my g3 w/8.5, and got no significant speedup, either perceived or benchmarkable.
ramdoubler _is_ important, i don't actually use it to increase memory, but i have it set for the same size as my physical ram (96); i get the benefits of having vm on (smaller memory partitions for individual apps), but don't take _near_ the performance hit.
just my thoughts,
ster

Hey Ster,

I stopped using RAM Doubler around MacOS 8.0/8.1 after all the great tributes that VM was getting at the time for its wonderful speed, yada yada yada, but I tried it because I needed some more stability. In the end it was just as fast or faster; so I'm interested to hear from you that you've found it beneficial, and I may try again to use my RAM Doubler investment after MacOS 9.0 gets clear of the mark.

Speed Doubler 8, on the other hand, is a real real earner. Yes I can understand that on a G3, lucky for you, you don't see any difference and can't even measure it on benchmarks. But then try it on a non-PCI G2 PowerMac and see what it does. Blitzing! You think all of MacOS 8.5 was PPC just because it stopped working on M68k Macs? Wrong ... the most noticable effect is the zoom rectangles, which just goes to show how much more potential QuickDraw has in it. There's other non-PPC code in there too, but I'll reserve judgment on whether MacOS 9.0 benefits from Speed Doubler until after I try it (and after Connectix releases a patch, that is!)

In the meantime, Speed Doubler makes my Mac quite a pleasure to use in its fourth year of service, as of this month.

--CK

My initial tests with Speed Doubler 8 with OS 8.5-8.6 weren't positive. It didn't seem to offer much of a speed increase with these systems. However I was wrong. Here is how I solved the problem: First, I used ResEdit to increase the Speed Doubler 8 extension and Control Panel memory to at least 30% greater than normal. To do this, make copies of them and open them in ResEdit. Then open the size resource and scroll down to the bottom where you can enter the memory increase. I increased both the size an minimum size in both the extension and Control Panel. I ran tests in OS 8.6, and there was a significant speed increase when copying files to other discs, duplicating files and in emptying the trash etc. Would this memory partition increase perhaps also work under OS 9, or does Connectix need to update Speed Doubler for OS 9 compatibility? Any readers who can enlighten us concerning this matter please post your thoughts and suggestions. By the way. I have a Performa 6400/200 603ev with 72 megs of RAM Thanks

[wlonh]

FYI there is a little freeware widget from the folks at AKUA Interactive Media called
The Reaper and it allows you to control the heap allocation for applications that you may not otherwise adjust. Examples are CD-ROM applications, the Finder and Background applications/processes (like SpeedDoubler)...

It also features a RAM Charger like expansion of the heap of applications you choose.

No need for the Resedit-fearful to go without a quick and easy way to change a RAM allocation in a background process...
get it here:
http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/Hype...reaper-121.hqx

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 10-03-1999).]

I'd like to point out that RAM Doubler and SpeedDoubler are likely going to cause more and more problems as newer versions of the Mac OS appear. They were basically designed as band-aids for when Mac OS development was stagnant. But nowadays, Apple is releasing a new rev of the OS every six months or so, and things are moving along at a fairly constant clip. Both products will become absolete within the next 4-6 months when Mac OS X arrives.

My personal experience has been that SpeedDoubler and RAM Doubler cause frequent crashes. But this shouldn't be too surprising. Both products rip out core OS code and replace them with software developed outside of Apple. It's a recipe for instability. Application developers expect the OS to behave in certain ways. When that behavior is modified unexpectedly, weird stuff starts happening. The same is true for the Mac OS itself. Apple engineers design all of the pieces of the OS to work with each other. Upsetting that balance is a bad idea.

And in reality, with each new release of the Mac OS, SpeedDoubler should help less and less, as more parts of the OS become native.

- Scott

Hey CK,
You asked about my RAM Doubler experience, so here's the story. The only reason I use RAM Doubler instead of the normal Memory Control Panel virtual memory is because:[list=a][*]I can set it for page-mapping only, so that native apps can use less memory but I don't take the performance hit of full VM (stuff doesn't actually get written to disk)[*]there's no (Physical RAM +1MB) scratch file that the normal VM uses.[/list=a]
If the Memory control panel let you turn on page-mapping without making that huge scratch file, or making you set it one meg over the physical ram (that means stuff actually does get written to disk), then I'd use it instead of RAM Doubler.

As for the nativeness, or lack thereof, in 8.5: I know that there's still some 68k code floating around in there (but 9's supposed to be 100% native), but I don't know how much, or how often that emulated code gets called. I never noticed any benefit, especially after the multi-threaded Finder. My last computer was a Quadra 660AV (25MHz 68040, 8MB RAM upgraded to 52MB, 230MB HD (now you see why I couldn't afford the HD space of normal VM!)) which I used every day up until last December (over 5 years, thank you very much). Speed Doubler was useful on it, but I don't know how well it is on anything inbetween.
Scott has a good point, too: as more and more of the OS becomes native (again, I recall reading somewhere that 9 will be 100%), the use of SpeedDoubler will decrease drastically.
Hope that clears things up,
Ster

[crusher4]

i liked speed doubler 8 becauze it made opening folders much faster....
also it makes my word 5.1a superfast.....(i hate word 98)

cyaz around
Crusher

You know if you used VM in the control panel it is slower then using Ram Doubler. It is also waste a lot of HD memory. I test both out Ram Doubler and VM to see which one is faster. To my amazement with VM on, the desktop background draw slower if you open a file that used a lot of RAM. Ram Doubler doesn't do this and if you set it to 80MB increased it will work pretty well, still not using both if you have a lot of RAM improve a lot. Ram Doubler is like a big weight added to your computer which decreased performance.

However MacOS will and other used more memory if you don't have VM on(For some weired reason it double the required RAM),so unless you have a lot of RAM you should used VM or consider Ram Doubler. So I hope Connectix will continue making it and keep supporting it throughout each Mac OS released.

speed doubler is REALLY useful to me for its smart copy feature: I can drag a whole volume to a backup device on our network, and it's smart enough to copy only the changed files.

With it, I can do backups on large projects throughout the day, without worrying about where all the pieces were saved and backup them up individually. The alternative, Retrospect, is too much of a pain to do umpteen times a day.

Other Speed Doubler features (68K emulation, keyboard shortcuts) are less useful.

[typoon]

I used to find Speed boosts with slower macs. I used speed doubler for the simplicty of the f keys feature. I didn't like the other programs which allowed someone to do that but I feel that with the advent of Mac OS 9 and this feature is now added I don't need speed doubler. I have found use with Ram Doubler because it allows the same feature as Apple's VM but without taking up the HD space. I haven't found many crashes at all with Ram Doubler. I run Techtool Once a week or when my computer crashes and Once it fixes the problems my Computer never crashes. I don't think the crashing is a Ram Doubler problem. I t may have been with older versions but Since I've been using it since Version 1.0 I have found no problems with it causing crashes. Usually the crashing I have found is due to errors that have been found by my utilities program.