
 Frob for Windows NT

 Copyright  1997-1999 Mark Russinovich

 Last Updated February 17, 2000 V1.6a
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  Introduction  One of the most annoying characteristics of NT is its lack
                of support for tuning various system performance settings
                such as the foreground and background process quanta (a
                quantum is the time-slice, or length of time a thread will
                run without being pulled off the CPU for another thread to
                run). On NT Server, the quanta are fixed for both
                foreground and background processes at 120ms, and on NT
                Workstation a background process has a quantum of 20ms,
                and a foreground process has a quantum of either 20, 40,
                or 60ms (the foreground boost slider in the Performance
                tab of the System applet in the Control Panel determines
                which).

                Well, here's a little applet that will let you "frob" the
                quanta to your liking. The new quanta will immediately be
                applied to every process in the system and will also
                affect new processes that are created.

                See my NT 5 Preview for information on quantum
                configurability coming in NT 5.0.

  Installation  Frob only works on NT 4.0 Final Release, SP1, SP2, SP3 and
       and Use  SP4, SP5 and SP6A. When you start Frob, it will display the system's
                current foreground and background quanta. Simply enter
                different values and press Apply. Press Reset to restore
                the quanta to those that existed at the startup of Frob.
                Note that values 0 and greater than 420ms are effectively
                equal to a quantum of 10ms, and that Frob does not check
                against these ranges.

                Another way to use Frob, available with Version 1.4, is to
                specify the foreground and background quantums on the
                command line:

                Usage: ntfrob [foreground quantum] [background quantum]

  How It Works  Frob consists of a GUI that communicates with a device
                driver to directly lookup and frob NT's internal (and
                otherwise inaccessible) quantum matrix. In addition, it
                travels the undocumented list of processes and adjusts the
                quanta they are assigned. When a thread starts a new
                quantum, it inherits the quantum value from its process.
                Similarly, when a new process is created, it adopts the
                quantum setting of its parent.

  License       You may not distribute Frob without the express written
                permission of Mark Russinovich. Use of this program is
                at your own risk. We take no responsibility for any damage
                that may directly or indirectly be caused by its use and
                make no warranties either expressed or implied.

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