Leading Wintech Frequently Asked Questions -------------------------- This file covers frequently asked questions about Waterfall and Rain. Q: How do Rain and Waterfall work? A: They're both small programs that issue HLT commands to idle parts of the CPU, so that they don't generate heat while they're idle. Q: What's a HLT command? A: It's a command that puts a certain part of the CPU into suspend mode. In advanced CPUs, this command can be executed while parts of the CPU are idle so that they can save power and stay cool. Q: What's the difference between Rain and Waterfall? A: Rain is the most efficient CPU cooling software there is. With Rain, you can expect your temperature decrease to be greater than with Waterfall. Waterfall however is more secure (that doesn't mean that Rain is buggy or will crash all the time, but Waterfall is more difficult to crash). Waterfall also has some additional features such as CPU busy state checking and a CPU monitor, which are not avalible in Rain. Q: Okay, okay, I get the picture... but which one should I choose? A: That depends on your needs. If you don't need a CPU monitor, then we recommend you to try Rain first. If Rain crashes under your system (don't worry, the fact that Waterfall is safer doesn't mean that Rain is unstable), then we recommend you to try Waterfall instead. The following comparison chart helps you understand the difference between Rain & Waterfall. Rain Waterfall System Performance Excellent Excellent Cooling Performance Excellent Very Good Secure Performance Very good Excellent Memory requirement 300K 300KB CPU Monitor No Yes Q: Sometimes the background in Waterfall's traybar icon becomes all red (but the icon itself remains blue), what does that mean? A: It means that your CPU is 100% busy - it doesn't mean that Waterfall is disabled though Q: Does using Waterfall and/or Rain decrease my overall performance? A: Well... the task that Waterfall & Rain both execute doesn't decrease your overall performance. However, no matter how small they are, Waterfall & Rain are programs, and just like any other program, while they're running, they do use some resources. However, the amount of resources that they use is negligible, so the impact on performance is almost null. Q: I've tried several fake performance boosters, how do I know that Waterfall or Rain really work? A: The only way to notice that they are really working is to measure your CPU and/or heatsink temperature. But, believe me, it works. Q: I hear some buzzing sound coming out of my speakers when using Rain or Waterfall, is something wrong? A: That's a very common problem. This is not a bug in either Rain or Waterfall, it's just that some hardware components have weird behaviors when a HLT instruction is executed. This buzzing sound seems to be the most usual problem - although some people think it's annoying, it's actually harmless. Q: I experience some weird side effects when running Waterfall or Rain. What should I do? A: The best thing to do is to try to identify if the problem is with the program itself or the HLT instruction. The only way to do that would be to install CPUIdle (another cooling program) and see if it works. If it doesn't, then contact your hardware manufacturers (especially your motherboard manufacturer) and ask them about any conflicts with the HLT instruction. Notice that if there is a conflict with HLT instructions, then this is not Waterfall or Rain's fault, in fact, the problem will be reproduced under any OS that uses HLT instructions (such as Windows NT for example). If you run CPUIdle and the problem disappears, then please contact the author of Waterfall and report this bug, along with a description of your hardware & of any softwares that you might have running on background. Another good way of getting help is to access Leading Wintech's message board. However, before you do that, we strongly recommend you to check if there's any hardware conflict with the HLT instructions- because if there is one, then there's very little we can do to help. Q: Do Rain and Waterfall work under Windows NT? A: No. Windows NT doesn't need CPU cooling programs that execute HLT instructions, such as Rain, Waterfall and CPUIdle, because it already comes with an option to execute HLT instructions when the CPU is idle. Q: Why is it that System Monitor and other CPU monitors indicate that my CPU is 100% busy when running Rain or Waterfall? A: That happens because these monitors only detect that a certain percentage of the CPU isn't being used when it's idle. Both Rain and Waterfall replace this idle mode with a suspend mode generated by the HLT instructions. Therefore, these monitors will always show that your CPU is 100% busy. There's no fix for this unless someone releases a patch for these monitors. Q: When running Rain or Waterfall, I get weird scores under Wintune. Why is that? A: Wintune isn't a good utility for measuring your system's performance, it's results can't really be trusted. If you run a Cyrix 6x86MX PR200 at 166Mhz and an Intel Pentium MMX at 166Mhz, it'll show exactly the same scores, but we know that the Cyrix CPU is much faster (when comparing Mhz per Mhz). Try using Winbench for a real performance benchmark. Q: Can I use Rain and Waterfall at the same time for a better cooling? A: Both programs do basically the same thing, so only one of them will work if you run them together. Copyright (c) 1998, Leading Wintech