trying to increase cd32 usable mem

i have a cd32 with terrible fire expansion 8mb


when it boots to workbench , i have around 5.6 - 5.8mb fast ram avail.


should i be getting more than that? , i know there are some programs runnin in the commodities handler


Copper-Demon

CXHandler
Magic Menu

Rawbinfo
Toolsdeamon


are all the above needed to actually run whdload games from the hard drive etc or are there some i can remove,im not keen on the copper colouring from copper demon,just wondered if its actually needed for something else.


finally are there other ways to increase the mem on startup.


tbh im not a fan of all the fancy icons and colours,i much prefer the basic original workbench look , but i dont fancy removing stuff in case i kill something lol.


any help would be much appreciated T.I.A

[Daedalus]

You could always approach from the other side and just do a standard Workbench 3.1 installation, which will take very little RAM. You should be able to take things out of WBStartup without breaking anything, which will stop them starting automatically on boot. Put them in another drawer, for example WBStartup-Disabled. Then, if you find that you miss the functionality they provided, you can always put them back.

However, I don't think the things you've listed are particularly memory-hungry. It could be that the partitions that are on the drive have been set up wit ha large number of buffers. This setting speeds up drive access by allocating RAM as a type of cache for each partition, but if you need the RAM, the values can be reduced. To see how many buffers are allocated, use the AddBuffers command in the Shell:

AddBuffers DH0:

for your DH0: partition for example. The amount of RAM allocated for the partition is this number times the blocksize of the partition, which could vary depending on the setup. HDToolbox can be used to change the number of buffers allocated, but be careful - it can also make your drive unreadable if you mess with any settings you shouldn't touch.