I'm not on Windows right now, but I think I can remember enough to be useful. You might be able to check your video card type by going to Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Device List (?), and there should be a tree of all the devices on the system. Just look for graphics or video or similar. As for the mysterious slowdown: Windows by default will not give a high priority to a program that is not receiving input, because clearly you have to be constantly interacting with a program to be using it. You can fix this by right clicking the fractint executable and going to the Properties dialog. There, under the misc tab, set the idle sensitivity to low. Check out this page for more tips: http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fracwin95.html On 6/12/06, Jim Muth <jamth@mindspring.com> wrote:

Fractal visionaries and enthusiasts:

Things are going well here at NFC. The new fractal cats are going especially well, and will likely have chosen their names before the end of the day. (It is now 11:30am.)

The main purpose of this letter is to clarify some of the confu- sion about how I run Fractint under WindowsXP.

To start, I run the professional version of XP. I chose it because it is designed for commercial operations such as mine. When I purchased it, I had no idea how well or even if it would run Fractint. I have never used the home version of XP, though I have tried to run Fractint under the home version on several other machines, usually with very limited success. The top video mode available was usually 640x480x16, the standard VGA mode. Some computers running the home version have simply locked up when I tried to boot Fractint.

But my fastest machine, a Dell-8400 2300mhz, which runs the pro- fessional version of XP, runs fractint perfectly, at over twenty times the speed of my old dedicated 200mhz Pentium unit. To run Fractint under XP-PRO I boot XP and bring up a DOS window. I do NOT go to full screen. Then I change to the Fractint directory, type <fractint>, and strike enter. The machine shifts to full- screen mode automatically when Fractint starts.

If I shift to full-screen mode before booting Fractint, the Fractint program calculates fractals at full speed for about a minute, then slows dramatically. The fractals need to be stopped and re-started every minute to keep them running at full speed. When I start Fractint in a DOS window and let it shift to full screen automatically, this strange slowdown does not occur.

For me, Fractint runs under XP-PRO's version of DOS as well as it does under straight DOS. All features including color cycling are fully functional. All video modes up to SF9, (1280x1024x256), which is the resolution limit of the monitor, are available. Offhand, I do not know if the fractals are dis- played in VESA mode, though the fact that all modes are automa- tically sized to fill the screen would lead me to believe that they are.

Unfortunately, with all the confusion left over from the big move, I cannot find the documentation that came with the computer, so I would need to dis-assemble the machine to determine the make and model of the video card. Things are still too rushed for me to start taking things apart.

I might have chosen a lucky combination of software and hard- ware, or there might be some real differences between the home and professional versions of XP. I'll check into it further as soon as things are more settled down here at NFC. (Maybe some- thing in my sstools.ini file helps things along.)

Jim M.

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-- Thanks, Jonathan Kotta Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.