Old Win98 System Dos Ramdrive: Want To Compress?

Hi! At my mother's house, I have a Win98SE tower. A little after getting it, I installed a RAM drive called RDSK98V5. I had to disable it, as eventually, I discovered it was causing a glitch with my graphics card: I was having a problem changing the video mode back to its current default after exiting a DirectX application. Decreasing the drive size helped a little, then removing it got the graphics to work properly. Then I noticed two more positive side-effects: an emulator that was crashing the system is working now, and DOS UMBs in Windows mode are working a little better: instead of preventing start-up, I now am getting crashes from Explorer. I want to see if, at the time, I was also trying EMS. I switched to using XMSDSK. It provides almost everything I need except nonvolativity and compression: nonvolativity meaning that I can't easily pack it with software whose access I want to speed up, and compression that I have to compress the RAM drive every time I turn the system on. I can solve the former by simply using a batch file to fill the RAM drive during start-up. The latter is a little harder: I either have to compress the drive at startup every time or compress it once, unmount the drive then copy the CVF to a special folder on the hard drive and during start-up, copy the CVF to the RAM drive then mount it then. Both methods are annoying and may not be worth it. Another problem with the latter is how do I mount the drive on-demand? Worse yet, from DOS? I'm using DriveSpace to compress my disks.

 

Just remember (after all is said and dome) is that files are "compressed," they will be:

1. Take longer to load, because they have to be "de-compressed" first.
2. They will be more difficult, if nigh onto impossible to back up on another computer, or even the one with which they were created, without the original or compatible compression software.

 

You're right. Other than executables by UPX, how can I easily compress the files on the RAM drives? Maybe I should just leave them uncompressed, as the RAM drive is pretty large anyway. I can use a batch file in either the AUTOEXEC.BAT file or in my Start menu's Startup folder to fill the RAM drive on startup. Thank you.