Autosave is a feature that automatically stores a copy of the work in progress at regular time intervals. If the system goes down, when the software restarts the software will notice the file that was in the process of being revised, and it will allow you to restart where the last save was taken. You may lose a few minutes of work, but not hours.

This feature will make you wait from time to time while it saves the file. You may find this annoying, and you might be tempted to turn it off. Someday a power spike will hit your office, someone will trip over the power cord, or you will accidentally hit the reset switch. You will be glad you left the autosave on. The time that you don't stop to save your work to disk will be the time when you are being really creative and running at 900 MPH. Murphy's law says that this is just the time some teenager will spin out his new Corvette, taking out the power pole outside, the circuit breaker on the pole, and your terrific four-hour burst of creativity.

There are two parameters that have to do with how keystroke processing is done on your PC’s. On some machines these settings can be changed in the BIOS parameters. These parameters are the length of time a key must be pressed before the system begins to repeat the keystroke, and the rate at which it repeats. Under all versions of Windows, these parameters can be changed under the Control Panel/Keyboard. The system will appear to be much more responsive.

If you are still using DOS for some dedicated machines, there is a utility that will set these parameters. It is the MORE command. Simply enter the following command at the command line or in a batch file (like AUTOEXEC.BAT);

MORE CON: RATE=31 DELAY=1

This simple change by itself can make the machine appear to be running much faster in many circumstances.

On older monitors, if you left your video turned on with the same information on the screen much of the time it would eventually burn that image into the screen phosphor. This left the screen virtually useless for other purposes. A class of programs known as screen savers evolved to mitigate this problem. They usually placed some image on the screen and moved it around slowly in a pattern. This image would alert you that the system was still on but moving it around kept the screen form being burned.

Under Windows there is a screen saver function that will accomplish the same thing. The screen saver will turn itself off and restore the regular windows screen when it senses that you move the mouse or touch a key on the keyboard. Unfortunately, watching all these possible events places a little extra burden on the system, even when the screen saver is not being displayed. It is a modest amount, but if you are trying to wring every last cycle out of an older, slower system, consider turning it off. Since modern monitors are not as sensitive to burning and there is less of a tendency to have the same thing on the screen all the time (as used to be the case with DOS menu programs, for example), the screen saver is not all that useful.

Of course, if you are in the habit of playing games on the system when you are supposed to be working and you are afraid that your boss will spot it when you are out to the restroom, you might want to leave it turned on.

Similarly, the "wallpaper" that you can turn on in all versions of Windows adds no functionality to the system and does take processing cycles when the windows are being updated. Once again, it is a modest amount, but can be significant on older machines.

This next idea probably will strike you as being trivial. Trust me. If you get nothing else from this book, this one idea is worth the cost. Blue light bends more than other colors when it goes from one medium to another, such as from the air into your eye. When the background is blue and the data is another color, it causes your eye to focus on the screen background and makes the data harder to read. This will actually lead to eyestrain and headaches among those who look at the screen for long hours daily.

If you think that this is too simple to be important, I challenge you to try it for a week. For reasons that are obscure, blue backgrounds look classy. Most professional software that supports color defaults to a blue background. Some packages have a blue background that cannot be changed! Even if you set software up to default to something else, many users will change it to blue. Challenge them to a one week test. The results will amaze you.

You may have users that come to you complaining that working with the CRT gives them eye fatigue, headaches, neck pain, or even lower back pain. Ask them what package(s) they use the most and what color the screen background is. Don't be surprised if they tell you it's blue.

On the hard disk on older machines, sequentially numbered sectors are not normally stored physically consecutively. The numbers stagger to allow the system time to prepare for the next read before the sector must be read. This means that the disk must rotate more than once to read the entire track. Most people have no idea what this parameter is. Many technicians are not even aware of it. The value set up for most disk drive initialization programs is very conservative. It is commonly set to three or four. Most modern drives and controllers can run at one. I strongly suggest that you at least check some of your systems. There are very few utilities that do this task.

Setting the proper interleave can make your disk 20 to 50 % faster. The utility IAU, or Interleave Adjustment Utility, can tell you how much it can be speeded up. IAU also will allow you to reset the value on the fly by reading the entire track into RAM, reformatting the track, and rewriting the data. If you are going to allow IAU to adjust the interleave, be sure that you have backed the drive up first! Any power failure that occurs during this operation may not only leave you with bad data, but also with a track that is partially formatted. If such a failure occurs, you probably have no choice but to reformat the drive and restore the data. Since the process can take several hours, you should have the backups.

You can alternatively format and reload the disk. You will have to find out how to adjust the interleave during the low level format. Different utilities do it differently. DOS utilities do not allow you to run a low level format. PC Tools 6.0 and later and Norton Utilities ?? and later allow resetting this value.