Scor­pio News

Perhaps the most universally used is Peter Norton’s SI (System Information) program which sits and chugs for a moment or two and finally spits out a ‘goodness’ number relative to a bog standard IBM PC at 4.77 MHz. A 6MHz IBM AT with one wait state clocks in at about 8.5, my toy shows up at 11.5 and so on. The latest version of SI goes on to test the relative goodness of the hard disk as well (which can be very revealing).

I’ve just done that, seems a bit slow today, perhaps the recent inclusion of Ndosedit has slowed the keyboard interrupt up a bit anyway she still performs adequately.

Another program for coming up with a relative performance index is SPEED by Landmark, there’s is simple, to the point and gives a graphical display like a thermometer. It’s not as good as SI for telling you whats going on in the computer but its ideal for my ball park speed figure and pretty too, impresses the customers.

The best for really putting the CPU through the hoops is the Microdesigns Performance Analyser but it’s results are difficult to interpret. But it does show BUS hang-ups and all sorts of strange goings on.