11.10 Serial Ports on 80286-Based Computers: Improving Performance

   If the baud rate-setting for your COM ports is  9600 or higher and you are
   experiencing slow COM performance or are losing characters when sending or
   receiving information using a communications application in standard mode,
   try the  following  solutions to  correct  the problem.  Try  solution one
   first. If that doesn't work, then try solution two, and so on:

   1.     Reduce the number of MS-DOS  drivers and terminate-and-stay-resident
      programs (TSRs) loaded from your CONFIG.SYS file.

   2.     Add  the following line to the [standard]  section of the SYSTEM.INI
      file:

              FasterModeSwitch=1

      Note: The  FasterModeSwitch setting  may not  work on  older systems  or
      systems that are  incompatible with Windows  version 3.1. In  this case,
      Windows may fail when you start it.

   3.     Do not load MS-DOS 5.0 into upper memory (do not include the command
      line dos=high in your CONFIG.SYS file).


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