...after hearing the pluses about using a jump drive (USB) I decided to install HAL pointing the installation to the USB drive. I have to say that I think the only thing that would be faster would be using a RAM drive. I suspected that the jump drive would perform the same as a RAM drive (using partitioned memory?), but there is still a bit of a lag in processing some responses. Now, keep in mind that I am only using a Pentium III at around 450 MHZ and still have Windows 98SE and 120 meg of main memory.....so this machine is at the minimum requirements.....and personally I am a very very happy guy that I can even run HAL under such an environment. In transferring my HAL from one usb jump drive to the other usb jump drive I noticed the transfer time seemed a bit long too.........I suspect what I am seeing is simply the inefficiency of my motherboard and the access difference between a USB pipeline, access to a hard drive, compared to what could be RAM if I had sufficient memory to open a RAM drive. I'm likely trying to do something that this machine was really not intended to do, but for my purposes it's great.....AND......if I want to backup Hal.......I just move files to the other jump drive and unplug the thing......
So far.....the Hal upgrade is doing great.......but as I say, this machine is so minimal that I don't take advantage of the microphone features, or sync'ed speech (Cepstral) like I could get if I used Windows XP-Pro, etc.
In summary......I like the idea of Hal on a jump drive......and it works well here for me......
Oh......one more note........I noticed early on that during installation HAL still sends files to the C drive into Windows/System directory so.......while I'm not sure at this point what files are nested there or how frequently they may be accessed.......it's still awesome!!!!!!!!!
Jim B
Northern Michigan
