Extending the Power of Hardware Profiles

Creating and Customizing Hardware Profiles
NT installs with a default profile, Original Configuration. This profile maps to the hardware, drivers, and services you installed during the initial setup. You can configure more profiles from the Hardware Profiles configuration window.

Let's look at the example in Screen 2. Moe has fine-tuned his laptop for optimal hardware profile utilization. He has taken his default Original Configuration and renamed it Docked at Work. This profile comprises all devices in his docking station (NIC, Video Card, and keyboard) and does not include the two PC Cards (network adapter and modem) on his laptop. Because Moe occasionally travels to other work sites that do not have a comparable docking station, he has used the Copy button to reproduce the docked profile, renamed it, and then disabled or enabled the appropriate devices under the Control Panel, Devices window. To work at other sites, Moe can disable the docking station's NIC and enable his PC Card NIC.

In his September article, Mike Reilly tells you how to choose what profile is using a docking station so the expansion port that connects the laptop to the station is properly used. For those times you won't be connecting to a network, you can create a profile to tell NT to ignore any network connections. To have NT load as fast as possible, click the Properties button, and choose the Network tab. From the dialog box in Screen 3, you can tell NT to ignore any network connections. The OS will disregard any networked drives or printers that automatically reconnect at logon.

Configuring Devices for a Profile
Once you've initially configured profiles, you can open Control Panel to further define them by Device or Service. Let's work with Moe's Undocked at Home-2 PC Cards (2 Modems) profile.

Moe wants to use multilink support, which is the ability to combine multiple links into one logical bundle, with the goal of increasing bandwidth. Because he has two PC Cards, he has to turn on the two devices for one profile and disable it for the others. From Control Panel, he double-clicks Devices to bring up the window in Screen 4, page 152. He scrolls down to Modem and clicks the HW Profiles button. From the window in Screen 5, page 152, he can select each modem and enable it for the proper profile.

Suppose you've exhausted your computer resources such as IRQ, direct memory access (DMA) channels, and I/O ports and you want to install a new card. I've seen high-powered off-the-shelf PCs that have maxed out their resources. With the onslaught of new devices on the market, the demand to have it all has put a strain on interrupts in particular. Computers have a predefined limit of 15 usable IRQs. However what happens when these IRQs are already assigned to your peripherals and you want to add a new card to your PC? As long as you have a slot or bay to plug into, you might be able to add that device after all.

Suppose you want to install an internal 56KB modem in your PC. After installing the device, you discover that it conflicts with your previously installed NIC because both use Interrupt 10. Because interrupts typically do not have provisions for sharing, you cannot get the new card to respond. If you don't mind using only one device at a time, you will not have a problem. Simply create two profiles. On the NIC-enabled profile, enable the NIC and disable the modem card. On the modem-enabled profile, do the opposite. You can now reach a stable configuration where each card can function, albeit only when the other is disabled.

Configuring Services for a Profile
Being a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and having a limited budget, I have configured my home PCs to use hardware profiles in an effort to conserve both RAM and hard disk space while I'm studying the latest BackOffice products. For example, I can install a common instance of NT for all my BackOffice applications as opposed to each BackOffice application having its own private OS instance. This setup saves more than 100MB per OS instance.

I also don't eat up scads of RAM by loading all the services for Systems Management Server (SMS), Exchange, and IIS anymore. Because I have only 48MB of physical memory, I configure a different profile for each application so I don't overwhelm the system.

To set up my home PC to use BackOffice hardware profiles, I initially installed IIS, SQL Server, and Exchange on NT. Things were pretty slow when NT was loading all the services into RAM (you can use Task Manager to get a quick snapshot of how much total memory the system is using) and the swap file started kicking into gear. To remedy the situation, I created three profiles. I clicked on the Services icon in Control Panel to get the window shown in Screen 6. I located the specific service I wanted to enable or disable and clicked the HW Profiles button.

Then, I enabled or disabled the service for each profile listed. In Screen 7, I've enabled the Exchange Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) service for the Exchange profile and disabled this service for IIS and SQL Server. When I repeated this procedure for all the appropriate services, I saw my system's performance increase dramatically.

One more use for profiles is for test conditions. For example, you can run BackOffice test configurations and conduct your benchmarks without having other BackOffice programs interfere with your analysis. This capability is particularly important when hardware is at a premium.

Maximizing Performance
This article digs into details about the role of hardware profiles. Although hardware profiles are optional, aspects of profiles can help you performance tune your PC, enable cards that would otherwise not work, and increase flexibility in laptop configurations.