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CD-ROM drives
If you want to speed up the response time of your CD-ROM drive, one way is to make the RAM cache for it a bit bigger. In your CONFIG.SYS file, find the line that looks like
IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS
and rewrite it at the end to say e.g.
IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS /C:4
and then reboot. What this does is change the default setting (/C:2) of 128 K RAM cache to 256 K. Having the bigger cache will hopefully speed up the response of your CD drive. Note, however, that you are stealing 128 K of RAM from OS/2, so this might not be the best thing to do on machines with 8 meg of RAM or less.
An additional speedup can be achieved by changing the maximum number of sectors that are read during a read access operation, e.g. by specifying
IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS /C:4 /M:4
This would decrease the number of sectors to 4. The default is 8 sectors (/M:8). The result is likely to be dependent on the dominating filesize on your CDs.
In general, increasing the value will also improve performance. When dealing with corrupt or hard to read CDs, you may want to decrease it, though, as this will increase the chance of rescueing data from the CD.
The last tip for CD-ROM drives is about enabling Joliet support. Joliet is an extension to the ISO9660 CD filesystem standard by Microsoft. It adds support for Unicode and the use of filenames that can be longer than 32 characters and in mixed case. This feature has been added by fixpaks to both Warp 3 and Warp 4 (from FP#4 on). To turn it on add a /W switch to your CDFS line, like in
IFS=C:\OS2\BOOT\CDFS.IFS /C:4 /W