OS/2 Tuning

By Christian Hennecke

When you install OS/2 or eComStation a lot of default settings are used. IBM has chosen them in a way that allows stable operation on the maximum number of different systems. While OS/2 usually works well as intended with the default settings there is much room to adapt your OS/2 system to your personal needs and your specific machine setup. This will probably result in dramatic performance gains.

These tips apply for the most part to all versions of OS/2 Warp and eComStation, unless otherwise noted. They also cover a very wide range of hardware, beginning with i386 machines with few RAM up to such with Athlon processors and 256 MB or more. Thus, not all the hints and tips are relevant for everyone. Those of a more "historical" value are announced as such in the text or, if a larger passage is concerned, are marked with the following icon at the respective paragraph. These tips may however contain some hints on the WPS that are also interesting for users of today's machines.

There may be errors or omissions that might lead to your machine blowing up. I strongly advise you to make a backup before fiddling around with your system's settings. You've been warned. So don't blame me if you end up with something unusable!

If you find any errors here, be it spelling, grammar, or wrong information, please send me a message and I will correct it. Any additional information is also very welcome.

The information presented here has been gathered from several resources. Much has been (sometimes literally) taken from Richard Oliver Kut's "How to Supercharge OS/2 Warp" document from 1996. I would also like to thank IBM for their document called "OS/2 Warp 4 Capacity Planning and Performance Tuning Guide" that proved to be very helpful and contains even more detailed information. Also my personal experience from fiddling around with several settings found its way here. Many hints come from all the people in the OS/2 Usenet groups. Another valuable source was the "OS/2 Warp 4 Kompendium" by Olaf Koch.