ACC1x: Microsoft Access Performance Enhancement Recommendations

• Microsoft Access versions 1.0, 1.1

SUMMARY

You can improve the performance of Microsoft Access by altering the memory configuration on your computer. This article lists several tips that you can use to enhance the performance of Microsoft Access on a computer with 4 MB of memory.

MORE INFORMATION

The following tips can be used to enhance the performance of Microsoft Access versions 1.0 and 1.1 on computers with 4MB of RAM:

• Do not use any of your RAM for a RAM disk.
• Use a maximum of 512K for SMARTDrive or other disk caches.
• Set your network installation to use less than 200K of RAM, if possible.
• Do not run several other applications that require large amounts of memory. Running even one other large application (such as a spreadsheet, word processor, or alternate desktop manager such as Norton Desktop for Windows) can significantly degrade the performance of Microsoft Access.
• Run Windows in standard mode.
• Set the maxbuffersize entry under the [isam] section in the MSACCESS.INI file to a value less than 512. In low memory cases this will help, even though less memory will be used by Microsoft Access for buffering database I/O. (See the Microsoft Access README.TXT file for details on setting this value.)
• Open databases as exclusive and read-only, if possible.
• If you do not want to use Access Wizards, you can disable them by removing the line "WIZARD.MDA=RO" from the [Libraries] section of the MSACCESS.INI file. This frees up over 300K of RAM, but takes away the ability to use Access Wizards.
• Keep the number of Windows accessory applications running to a minimum.
• If you have a full-screen background bitmap (or "wallpaper") on your Windows desktop, replace it with a smaller bitmap, or no bitmap at all. For a standard VGA video display, this frees about 256K. For a 1024x768 256 color display, this can free about 3/4 of a megabyte. (Your actual memory savings may vary, depending on the display.)
• Keep in mind that CD-ROM device drivers, sound board drivers, screen savers, MIDI drivers, multi-media support drivers, and other drivers take extra memory. The 4 MB recommendation does not take this into account. If you need to have several drivers running under Windows, then more memory than 4 MB will be required for Microsoft Access to run efficiently.