*** Wintune 95 Release 1.0 (11/30/95) *** Thank you for trying Wintune 95. This file lists solutions to common problems you may have. Please read it before posting questions. Thanks! Wintune 95 is meant only for the release version (build 950) of Windows 95 and for Windows NT 3.51. ============ INSTALLATION ============ Run SETUP.EXE and follow the prompts. If Setup determines that some of the files are already on the system, or if Wintuneis installed a second time, the install progress bar won't always go to 100%. This is "normal". Also, after the setup runs there may be an empty button with no caption on the task bar. Clicking it will make it go away. This is "normal" too. Missing DLLs ------------ If Wintune doesn't start and you get a message you're missing MFCxxx.DLL, you do not have some of the standard Windows support DLL files. Under Windows 95, this may have happened because Win95 was installed with Custom or Compact setup options. You can nudge Win95 to install the needed DLLs by installing WordPad. From Control Panel, click Add/Remove Programs. Click the Windows Setup tab and double-click Accessories. Scroll down to the bottom of the list and check WordPad. OK your way out to complete the installation. Windows NT users, or Windows 95 users who do not have access to their setup disks, should download the file WT95NT.ZIP. It includes the extra files you need to run WT95 under NT 3.51. They were not included here because they more than double the total size and are often already on your system. On Windows 95 these files should be placed in the Windows SYSTEM directory; Windows NT needs these files in the SYSTEM32 directory. ======= SUPPORT ======= Inside Wintune, you can generally get help on any result or tip by clicking the Tell Me More button, by double-clicking the item, or by right-clicking and selecting Tell Me More. We've tried to make it easy to get to the help file! As Wintune 95 version 1.0 ships, we've had more than 10,000 downloads during the beta test period. Many thanks to the many beta testers who actively worked to report and follow up on the bugs they found. We still want to hear from you if you have suggestions to improve Wintune, or if there's a bug that we missed. We'll be taking feedback and answering questions in both the America Online and Compuserve WinMag forums in the Wintune95 folder/section. Since many people have the same questions, you may find your questions already answered there. Making a WTX file ----------------- If you want to send your results to another user, or send them to us so we can help diagnose a problem, you need to produce a Wintune export (.WTX) file: 1) Start Wintune 95. 2) Click the Analyze Now button. 3) Wait until the testing is complete. 4) Select File/Export Current from the menu. 5) Type in a directory and file name. The file you create is an ASCII (plain text) file in a special format that Wintune can import into its database. You can either attach it to a message, or you can insert the text of the WTX file directly into an email or forum message. =============== System Analyzer =============== * Wintune is reporting the BIOS information stored in the Registry, but this appears to only be set by Windows 95 upon installation. If you upgrade the BIOS or switch the disk to a new system, the new version info will not be reflected. Windows NT updates this info each time it boots, so it doesn't have this problem. This is a Win95 bug, we may bypass them and do our own groping in a future release. ============ CPU Analyzer ============ * Some 486DX2 and 486DX4 CPUs are reported simply as 486DX. This is because those CPUs do not have a way for software to determine internal versus external clock rate. Newer models support a CPUID instruction which specifies the CPU type. * Wintune erroneously reports the Cyrix 5x86/100 as a Cyrix 486DX running at 83MHz. We expect to get updated information from Cyrix on how to recognize their CPUs and will include it in the next release. =============== Memory Analyzer =============== * Wintune 95 gets its Installed RAM result from Windows (NT or 95). However, Windows 95 does not appear to count any memory that is used by DOS device drivers or the BIOS itself (e.g. used for ROM shadowing). This may cause the Installed RAM reported to be lower than the actual amount of installed RAM. We may bypass them and do our own groping in a future release. ============== Video Analyzer ============== * The true-color bitmap (Eye) has been removed. This test was the cause of GPFs (because of bad video drivers, not the test) and it caused a first-run variability because of the time it took to load the bitmap the first time. The "Video speed" result has been changed to exclude this test, so comparisons to Wintune beta results should be made using the subtests. * Text is clipped in scroll test when running 640x480 resolution; this is just cosmetic and doesn't affect results. We will fix this in an upcoming release. * ATI has just released a new driver that doesn't conform to the standard method Microsoft has documented in the Windows 95 Resource Kit for installing Plug and Play drivers. Wintune uses this documented method to determine if you are using a Plug and Play driver, so the ATI driver is reported as an older Win3.x driver. We don't yet know who is right on this one. ============= Disk Analyzer ============= * Both the cached and uncached tests may vary by more than 10 percent on systems with less than 10MB of RAM. This is due to swapping. The problem will be worse if you have created a large Wintune database, so keep the database small. * Some systems give an uncached result that is clearly not uncached. For example, the cached result on one system was 13MB/s but "uncached" was 14MB/s! This seems to occur with systems using DOS compatibility (16-bit) drivers and some third-party drivers. We're still checking this problem out, and would like reports from affected users. * One user of an Adaptec 2942 SCSI controller reported an uncached number of 0.8 MB/s but copying a large file yielded a more credible 3 MB/s. We're investigating this one and would like reports from other users. ============= Apps Analyzer ============= * Instructions for building your own app tests are included in the help file. Right-click the Apps node in the Details tab and select Tell Me More. * Two testers have reported that the Excel macro hangs when run from Wintune, but works fine if launched directly from Excel. We haven't been able to reproduce this; please report to us if it happens to you. ========== Help Files ========== * For modularity, the help files are implemented as separate files for each analyzer and a main help file. Cross-file references have not been implemented, so you need to start with an idea of what (video, disk, CPU, memory) you want to check out. Or you can browse all the help files by going to the Details tab; for each analyzer right-click the name and select Tell Me More. *** END OF README ***