[NTLK] Two Modern Win32 slowdown.exe alternatives, one free (was: Re: Connecting eMate to Windows)

Aaron wrote:
> I decided to give up the connectivity with the Windows machine and try it on
> my g3 imac and that worked fine. After a few hours I decided to try it again
> with my windows box. I was messing around and decided to run 10 slowdown.exe's
> with the slider all the way to the right on each one. It actually worke. I
> then tried to run 4 again and it worked... well it worked once.
> After a few more experiments, it seems that I need to run 6 of the
> slowdown.exe's with the sliders all the way to the right. Now I can install
> packages and its seems to be good. I do have another issue, but I'll make a
> new post for that.
>
>
> If I've got two slowdown.exe's running (both are set to the second
>> notch from the left). and each is taking about 33% or 34% of the CPU
>> resources then my system is running at around 33% or 34% CPU
>> resources...

Hi folks

I am the happy owner of an Athlon[32] Thunderbird XP3200+, running at
2.2GHz, with 2GB of RAM, and an Nvidia NForce2 chipset.

I had simply been syncing my MP2100 and MP2000 at 9600 bps, since this
worked for me without any tweaks, but this was obviously horrendously slow.

I am now able to sync at 57,600 with 100% reliability, using a
completely free, noncommercial utility called "CPU Speed Adjuster" which
you may download at http://tinyurl.com/yex32s
which is just
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/CPU-Speed-Adjuster.shtml
the direct download link on Softpedia links to
http://www.adrianboeing.com/files/slow.exe

Using this utility, I tested about 100 iterations, finally discovering
that I could not set the desired CPU usage slider below 65% on my CPU
and get reliable transfers of very large packages (1.1MB). You only need
to load one copy of it, not six ;-) Presumably, if you have a machine
faster than 2GHz, you'll likely need to set the slider above 65% until
syncing of large files works reliably (test syncing with large packages,
as they are simply statistically more likely to induce an error)

There is, however, a more-elegant solution. The product Mo'Slo, which
has been around since the DOS days (I remember using it there) is a
damned fine Windows slowdown application, if not the finest. It actually
installs a kernel-mode driver shim into Win2K/XP which slows down the
*application* and not your CPU, by simply munching up cycles. You need
the biz/professional version, which is only USD $25, four more dollars
than the non-pro version.

I bought a copy of this software, and the nicest thing about it is that
it allows you to create a shortcut directly to NCU.exe which slows down
that one single app sufficiently, not your whole system. I am able to
reliably sync at 57600 with it.

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