USING THE RAM The Amiga craves extra RAM (random access memory) and the original 1000's were released in the US with 256Kb and with 512Kb here - this was like selling a car with two wheels & no juice. The 500 can be immediately upgraded internally to 1Mb while the 2000 comes with that standard. However, it's soon obvious that that quantity can be added to with serious benefits and anyone who's greedy, or doing graphic intensive work like animations or Desktop Publishing, or simply wants to make the most of multi-tasking will soon be looking for about 2 Mb. It's also very good for using a "Recoverable RAM disk" as I'll describe below. The points made in this article however can be applied to those with 512Kb RAM with good effect, especially those with a single disk drive. The 68000 CPU can address about 16 Mb of RAM, though Commodore has seen fit to reserve a large chunk of that for their own purposes. Some people may not know that the very existence of a RAM disk provided for in the Amiga's Operating System is unusual among micro-computers - a normal IBM doesn't have one without buying special hardware and software, and nor do the Mac or the Atari. You won't be aware of the RAM disk until you "mention" it, for example by entering > dir ram: in the CLI. Now if you check the Workbench screen you'll see a disk icon saying "RAM", which behaves just like a normal disk: you can open its window, copy things to it by dragging them from other disks, run programs that you put in there from the CLI or Workbench, and so forth. The RAM disk icon will stay around until you switch your computer off and on again. Some general points about using RAM: one quite simple way of using it is to simply copy a program into RAM and run it from there. You'll find a definite increase in speed and performance with most programs this way - Pagesetter, for example moves a lot faster in refreshing the display, and if you also save your work to RAM there will be a greater speed-up (though be careful of Gurus when doing this, since RAM is volatile and disappears if you have to re-boot - the Recoverable Ram Disk solves this problem, as discussed below>. Going a bit further, you can copy various things into Ram from your startup-sequence : change it using a Text editor such as ED in the CLI. Now when you boot up you'll automatically have specific things copied to Ram. One very useful thing to do is to copy your most used CLI commands over and then make the computer access them without looking on your Workbench disk. In other words, you can free up a disk drive. For example... > makedir ram:c > cd sys:c > copy (dir|cd|copy|type) ram:c > path ram:c add The last command (path) is useful for telling the system to also look in the place you specify for its commands. You could have copied the whole C directoryto RAM by entering > copy to ram:c which copies everything in the C directory to ram:c. And instead of using thePath command you could assign the C directory of the system to ram:c i.e. > assign c: ram:c The more you load into Ram, the longer it takes. A further benefit of expanded RAM is that you can have large amounts of data in memory, so you can play around with a huge spreadsheet, or pageset a very large document, or load a big animation into ram and play without disk access. Likewise you can have a number of large programs running simultaneously and really get something out of multi-tasking. One of the most useful utilities around is the Recoverable Ram Disk by ASDG in the US. This is available on Fish Disk 58 and is Shareware (ie, you're morally obliged to send them a small donation if you use it regularly). By adding "asdg.vdisk.device" to your devs directory along with a "Mountlist" as specified in the documents which accompany it, and by changing your startup-sequence as described you can copy anything into "VD0:" (virtual device, meaning it acts just like a real disk device). With enough Ram you can copy your entire Workbench disk in and then remove your actual disk from the drive and use VD0: as a super-speedy system disk. The difference between this and just copying things into Ram is that if you have a dreaded Guru you don't have to have cardiac fibrillations because when you re-boot you'll find everything there just as you left it. I use the RRD for every session except a quick 10 minutes. It does take its time to load at the beginning but if you're going to be at the computer for a while it's certainly worth it, and of course you've got an extra drive to play with. The Starboard 2 by Microbotics has a similar utility as part ot their optional Multifunction Module. Note: by using the "ReadKwik" and "RiteKwik" utilities on Fish 103 in the "DosKwik" directory, you can convert an entire disk into a single file, and then read it into RAM as part of your startup-sequence - this is extremely speedy and also saves wear and tear on your internal drive. Anyone regularly copying quantities of stuff into Ram would be well advised to check this one out. It is also very useful as a way of backing up a hard disk - the program tells you when to insert a new disk, which needn't even be formatted, into the drive. A friend of mine said he backed up 28 megs in 20 minutes!!] One problem you may find with FAST Ram (which is what all expansion Ram is, as distinct from the 512Kb of CHIP Ram which comes with your machine) is that some programmers mistakenly included graphics data in their software without specifying that this should be loaded into CHIP Ram. AmigaDOS tries to load everything into Fast Ram where the Custom chips cannot get at it. Deluxe Paint I had this problem. The solution is to run the Public Domain program FIXHUNK on the wayward program - this forces any "data hunks" to be loaded into Chip Ram. (Find FIXHUNK on Fish Disk 36.)