[NTLK] How to connect your Newton to an ultra-fast 64 bit Windows 7 PC without using additional hardware or slowdown.exe

[NewtonTalk]

Hi folks,

I have found a way to connect my Newton to my brand spanking new ultra-fast
64 bit Windows 7 PC without having to use additional hardware or
slowdown.exe.

First things first: If you have a 64 bit Windows PC, you won't be able to
install NCK, NCU, NTK et al since to the best of my knowledge these are 16
bit applications that can be installed on 32 bit machines, but not on 64 bit
machines. I worked around this by setting up a virtual machine using my 32
bit Windows XP CD and installing NTK on this virtual machine.

Slowdown.exe is a program that gives your PC so much to do that the CPU has
little time to take care of other things. So said other things happen
slower, which makes the data transfer more reliable. On my old PC I needed
four separate instances of slowdown.exe. This more or less choked the CPU
and made it very hot. Since my new PC is way faster, slowdown.exe is no
longer an option. This animal was kinda expensive, and I won't heat its CPU
up unless I have to.

There's a Windows setting that is well hidden and doesn't belong where it
lives. But the force was with me today. By chance I stumbled across it in
Control Panel -> Power Options.

Once you have opened the Power Options, click on "Change when the computer
sleeps". Then click "Advanced power settings". A dialog will open. Open
"Processor power management" and "Maximum processor state". It will probably
be set to 100%. Set it to 1% and apply your change.

I am not sure if this works with all Windows versions and hardware setups.
Come to think of it, I'd be surprised if it did. I assume that for this to
work at all, the main logic board and the BIOS must support reducing the
CPU's clock frequency.

Sandra Lite (an excellent and free PC diagnostic program I've been using
ever since I built my first PC, available at http://www.sisoftware.eu/)
shows a clock frequency of about 780 MHz using the 1% setting and about 4GHz
using the 100% setting. Since 780 MHz is way more than 1% of 4GHz, there
must be a minimum clock frequency.

Amazingly, the PC doesn't feel at all like an 800 MHz machine. I don't
notice any performance reduction whatsoever. This is probably because modern
PCs twiddle their thumbs most of the time anyway if all you ask of them is
typing a NewtonTalk post and having a virtual machine transfer a Newton book
via the serial port.

During the last 30 minutes I've installed a 2 Megabyte Newton book on ten
different memory cards. The connection didn't miss a beat. If the above
setting is at 100%, it terminates immediately.

If you try this out, make sure you establish the connection on the Newton
first. Then select the package to download in NTK. Things will fail (and
have failed since the beginning of time) if you try it the other way round.

Since this will be beneficial to many Newton users, please post you findings
here, including you Windows version and where, if at all, you found the
"Maximum processor state" setting.

Cheers

Frank

-- Newton software and hardware at http://www.pda-soft.de