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scg
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Windows 95
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Aug 21 00:18 UTC 1995 |
With Windows 95 only four days away from release to the masses, and
with a lot of us already using it, what are peoples' impressions of it? What
do you like, or not like? Is Explorer nicer than Program Manager?
I've only been using Windows 95 for a few days, so I haven't formed
much of an impression on it. But, I do think it has some features that make
it nicer than Windows 3.1. I really like the task bar, since I find it's a
lot easier to find something on the task bar than it was to look for a burried
window or icon, and I also find the somewhat Mac like system for getting at
directories and files on the disks to be a big improvement over File Manager.
It's also nice to be able to run Windows programs from the DOS prompt, since
I prefer command line interfaces for a lot of things, but I've kept using
Imposter since it does a lot of things that command.com still doesn't do.
The plug and play hardware instalation is nice too, when it works.
One thing I haven't been too happy with (although I am using it as I
write this) is the built in PPP. I'm hoping I just have it misconfigured,
but I really miss LAN WorkPlace's ability to redial, and to start the PPP
connection automatically when I opened something that needed it. So far, with
my Windows 95 setup, the PPP connection has to be opened manually, and does
not attack dial.
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| 59 responses total. |
mju
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response 1 of 59:
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Aug 21 00:33 UTC 1995 |
You can turn on redialing -- go into the "properties" section of the dialup
networking connection; it should be on one of the tabs. (Maybe under "Dialing
Properties"?) The fact that it doesn't automatically launch when a network
app runs *is* unfortunate; the Mac deals with that very well.
I despise the "Explorer" application, but then again I also disliked File
Manager under Windows 3.1. The new Finder-like shell is very nice, as is the
ability to put file icons on the desktop. Shortcuts are very cool.
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ajax
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response 2 of 59:
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Aug 21 13:30 UTC 1995 |
I confess I've only read about it so far, but one thing I like (on paper
anyway) is that MS provides good toolkits and hooks specifically geared
toward game programming. Animation through Win95's "DirectDraw" is
supposed to be faster than DOS, which was faster than Win3.1, which will
likely make it the game OS of choice for PCs. Other APIs MS provides are
DirectSound, which simplifies sound support and synchronization with video,
DirectInput which improves support for other input devices (MS is rumored
to be readying a medium/high-quality joystick), and DirectPlay to handle
the low-level details of writing multiplayer network/modem games. Of
course the motivation for this great game support, according to analysts,
is that MS is planning to dominate the computer game market in the next two
years, but I think overall it'll mean cooler games from everyone.
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curby
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response 3 of 59:
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Aug 24 08:46 UTC 1995 |
Today is the day. I am heady from the exitement of the moment. If I
were not at work tonight, I would join the crowds that are sure to
gather in front of the software stores tonight as people wait for the
products to be put on the shelves. Indeed, it is a shame that the
major networks have not devoted the entire broadcast day to the showing
of the preview that microsoft is going to put on. For indeed, this is
much larger then the showing of Simpson trial!
I will see you in the checkout lines, comrades...
(Now where did I put those Linux disks? <grin> )
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ajax
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response 4 of 59:
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Aug 24 12:59 UTC 1995 |
I heard a fairly humorous gripe...a guy had a 1 gig hard drive,
which he partitioned as one logical drive. He's copying his files
over, and after about 650 megs, gets an "out of disk space" message.
After probing around, Win95 tells him that he's got 650MB of files,
and 350MB of "slack space!!!" Evidently, Win95 maintains much of
the DOS 1.0-style filesystem layout, making mandatory 32K clusters
for files (on a 1GB disk), which can't be suballocated between files.
Yow!!! I'm wondering if it's a plot to get people to use their
double-space software, which I assume will suballocate the clusters;
I believe Win95 gives you a crufty version free, then MS charges an
extra $40 to get the "Plus!" package with a better double-spacer.
But nah, greedy as they are, it's much more likely due to laziness.
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ajax
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response 5 of 59:
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Sep 7 17:29 UTC 1995 |
Well, I confess to installing it. On the up-side, it recognized my
hardware, and the sound/graphics/cd-rom drivers all work correctly!!!
(I have a Mac, so I'm not astonished at correctness, but I don't know
if I've ever seen a Windows configuration work 100% correctly before).
The interface has some okay features...for novice users, it seems like
a good design...and I kind of like the "task bar" that shows a box with
each currently running process on it, to simplify task switching (just
click on the process' button). The configuration programs have nice
interfaces too...less reliance on pull-down menus, more reliance on
"tabbed dividers" to pull up different "pages." And things I preferred
over Macs in earlier Win releases are retained: keeping menu bars with
the app's window, rather than the screen's top, and making almost all
selections keyboard-selectable by default (e.g., Alt-F to pull down the
file menu). Though the Start button doesn't have an obvious keyboard
shortcut, and since usually the first thing I do with Win-95 is start
the "shutdown Win-95 and go back to DOS" command, that's a drawback :).
On the downside...remember when OS/2 Warp came out, they had the
slogan "DOS faster than DOS, Windows faster than Windows?" Well, Win95
does DOS slower than DOS, and Win (16-bit) slower than Win 3.1. Plus
it can just crash DOS sessions, with a casual "Your DOS session was just
terminated, OK?" message, and DOS sessions hang (and hang the entire
friggin' system - you can't even ctrl-alt-del) in places they didn't
previously hang. I preferred Win 3.1, whereby you started in DOS, and
ran Win...with Win 95, you can get back to a nearly-DOS-only session,
but you start in Win95, then have to choose "shutdown - reboot to DOS."
Oh...and if you type "exit" at a DOS prompt then, to see if you're
shelled out from an app or not, it reboots your computer and restarts
Win95.
I heard of a popular CA bumper sticker: "Windows 95 = Macintosh 89."
I does strike me that many of Win95's innovations are like a slightly
improved version of the Mac OS of '89, like its built-in support for
features for visually or hearing impaired users. (I got a free Win 95
T-Shirt, to which I fully intend to add "= Macintosh 89." :-)
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scg
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response 6 of 59:
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Sep 8 05:05 UTC 1995 |
- The keyboard shortcut for the start button is Control-Esc.
There's an ini file setting somewhere that controls whether it loads
in DOS or Windows mode by default, but my quick look through the help didn't
find it right now, and I'm too lazy to check Microsoft TechNet at the moment.
I'll try to look it up sometime in the next few days. You can also boot
straight to DOS by hitting the F8 key right after it tells you "Starting
Windows 95" while booting. That will bring up a menu giving you several
choices of how to boot, including MS DOS mode.
I haven't had the DOS problems you described. I actually prefer the
Windows 95 way of doing things, where when things crash (which doesn't seem
to happen as often as it did under Windows 3.1) they generally don't take the
whole system with them.
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ajax
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response 7 of 59:
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Sep 8 13:38 UTC 1995 |
Wow, I'll look into the boot-to-dos thing. I'd prefer a single process to
crash instead of the whole system, but (a) this doesn't always happen -
Procomm consistently hangs my entires system at the end of a file transfer,
and (b) my DOS sessions didn't previously crash in places where they crash
with Win95 (like sitting at a *DOS prompt* for Pete's sake!), and now they
sometimes do, as I switch between DOS and Win screens.
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n8nxf
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response 8 of 59:
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Sep 8 17:28 UTC 1995 |
Nope. I already have that. It's just ST01 / 02 installation guide.
No drivers.
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scg
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response 9 of 59:
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Sep 9 05:42 UTC 1995 |
I'm a bit surprized about it crashing as it sits at a DOS prompt. None of
the machines I've dealt with Windows 95 on (and I've dealt with some pretty
screwed up computers) have had that problem. Are you sure you aren't running
something else that's doing it? I should note that I *always* have a DOS
window open when I'm using Windows 95. The version of command.com that comes
with Windows 95 will run Windows programs from the command line, which makes
it a system that I can use without always having to reach for the mouse to
do anything easily. Also useful from the command line is "start .", which
will bring up the GUI form of the current directory.
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ajax
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response 10 of 59:
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Sep 10 15:12 UTC 1995 |
I can't reproduce a crashing DOS prompt, but it does happen, and I'm quite
certain it's a bug in either W95 or W95's DOS shell. The last time it
happened, I was running scandisk, just flipped to the DOS screen, flipped
back, and got the message saying the DOS session had been terminated.
I can reproduce total system hangage, which I thought was supposed to be
rare with W95. It certainly makes it a weak OS contender for a lot of
"mission-critical" apps (database servers, comm servers), though I gather
MS is still hyping WinNT for these uses.
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scg
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response 11 of 59:
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Sep 11 00:27 UTC 1995 |
I'm wondering if scandisk is one of those few DOS programs that isn't intended
to run in Win95. I think Win95 really wants people to use the Win95 version
of ScanDisk. It's a Windows program, and has a lot of things that make it
nicer than the DOS ScanDisk.
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ajax
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response 12 of 59:
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Sep 11 15:34 UTC 1995 |
I was using W95's ScanDisk...I tried "chkdsk /f" from DOS, but it said "Hey,
try out W95's new ScanDisk, it's better than chkdsk!" Seeing as W95 uses
a new disk layout, I would guess that using any older disk utilities would
be a disastrous idea (Norton, Mace, Symantec, etc.).
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ajax
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response 13 of 59:
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Sep 17 16:15 UTC 1995 |
Ugh...I made the mistake of installing "Microsoft Plus," which now
intelligently schedules programs to run when the computer is just sitting
there. I'll leave my computer at a DOS prompt, and come back to a stack
of dialog boxes saying things like "error, process terminated, ok?" They
should have called it Microsoft Minus!
I read an interesting article in PC Magazine which explained why Win95
can hang your entire system, and why its processes crash so much. They
wrote 7 "crash" programs that do illegal things, and tried them out on
five OS's to see how they'd survive. Results are summarized below:
Win3.1&3.11 Win95 OS/2 3.0 WinNT3.51
16-bit GP fault Recovers Recovers Recovers Recovers
16-bit overwrite mem below Win Crashes Crashes Recovers* Recovers
16-bit Overwrite system DLL Crashes Crashes Recovers* Recovers*
32-bit page fault n/a Recovers Recovers Recovers
32-bit overwrite mem below Win n/a Recovers Recovers Recovers
32-bit overwrite mem above Win n/a Crashes Recovers Recovers
32-bit overwtite system DLL n/a Crashes Crashes Recovers
Recovers* = "Terminates 16-bit session and recovers gracefully"
From what I can tell, Win95 just reuses too much old Win and DOS code to
be reliable. The only likely approach I've heard to keeping Win95 from being
able to crash your entire system, ironically, is to install it on a PowerMac.
A guy in Usenet was describing how he installed it under SoftWin with fewer
problems than he had installing it on his Compaq, and while it was slow, he
could still run other Mac apps and play CDs in his Mac even during the Win95
installation. :-)
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scg
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response 14 of 59:
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Sep 17 20:46 UTC 1995 |
I like Microsoft Plus! although I found the System Agent's default settings
a bit of a pain. The good news about the System Agent is that you can very
easily change the schedule on anything that it's doing, tell it not to do
things that it is doing, tell it to do things that it isn't doing, or turn
it off entirely. The few things I do have it running are set to run at
various different points in the week at times between 6 and 9 am -- times when
I'm just about certain to be home in bed rather than at work trying to use
my computer. Just to be on the safe side, I have it set that it won't do
anything unless the computer has been idle for over an hour.
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scg
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response 15 of 59:
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Sep 21 05:45 UTC 1995 |
Maybe this shold go in the Humor item, but I ran across something today that
Windows 95's detractors would cling to. I was reinstalling Windows 95 on a
computer that had Norton AntiVirus installed on it, and Norton was absolutely
convinced that Windows 95 must be a virus, since the installer was overwriting
the Master Boot Record.
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ajax
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response 16 of 59:
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Sep 21 17:15 UTC 1995 |
Norton knows his stuff :-). Another humorous W95 blurb I read said that
Win 95 was banned in India, because a few pixels in its world map (used
to set the time zone of your computer) indicated a disputed region on
India's border as Pakistan's...the gov't was considering banning all MS
products. An MS spokesperson said something like "it's just a few pixels,
and if we fixed it, it could just change again." Truly inspired P.R.!
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scg
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response 17 of 59:
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Sep 22 04:17 UTC 1995 |
I don't remember there being borders on the world map. I'll have to take
another look at that tomorrow (I'm going to have to do at least two Windows
95 instalations tomorrow).
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scg
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response 18 of 59:
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Sep 24 05:23 UTC 1995 |
The world map in the Windows 95 installer doesn't have national borders on
it, so there's no indication in it of what's India's and what's Pakistan's,
or anything else like that. Were the problems with the Indian gov't with a
beta, or was Microsoft shipping a special version with borders on it to areas
with border disputes, in hopes of standardizing Microsoft Borders?
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ajax
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response 19 of 59:
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Sep 24 15:21 UTC 1995 |
If you chose Control Panel/Regional Settings, that pops up a big
functionless map. But on Control Panel/Date-Time/Time Zones, you
get a world map with delineated time zones. Click on India. It has
its own vanity time zone (GMT+05:30). To its northwest, there are
around 10 or 15 pixels (about the size of Michigan) missing from what
India claims as its borders, the Kashmir region disputed with Pakistan.
However, the controversy may have applied to the Regional Settings
map...the blurb I read says: "Microsoft fixed the problem by disabling
the map feature entirely." I'm not sure if they mean they disabled
the Time Zone map for Indian copies, or if that's why the Regional
Settings map is just a useless picture for everyone. If it's the
latter, you're probably right, the main problem being with the beta.
Microsoft Borders...that could definitely simplify world conflicts :-).
"Sorry, it's already on CD-ROM, your borders can't be changed."
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scg
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response 20 of 59:
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Sep 24 22:40 UTC 1995 |
It occurred to me after I entered that last response that India and Pakistan
might be in different time zones, but I didn't think to check on it until
after I was at home, where I don't have any computers capable of running
Windows 95. That makes sense now.
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rcurl
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response 21 of 59:
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Dec 10 18:26 UTC 1999 |
I think I'd like to upgrade a ThinkPad from WIN 3.1 to WIN 95. I haven't
done anything with PCs since DOS 3.3, however, so I would appreciate
any advice anyone can offer. Here are the ThinkPad specs:
755C IBM ThinkPad
SL Enhanced 486 DX2 - 25/50 MHz
RAM 8 MB
HD 344 MB
I expect I need a RAM upgrade, so am looking for a 16 MB IC DRAM card
(IBM No. is 66G5109).
And...where can I find a copy of WIN 95 on 3.5" floppies?
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gull
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response 22 of 59:
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Dec 10 19:00 UTC 1999 |
Win95 will run in 8 megs, but performance is much more acceptable in 16.
Make sure you can get Win95 drivers for any unusual hardware in the
ThinkPad.
Win95 on floppies is about 30 diskettes. I don't know if you can still buy
it that way; however, if you can't find it, I have a copy on floppy that
came with my Toshiba laptop that I'd be wiling to part with. I've upgraded
the laptop with a CD kit, and I much prefer installing off CD to feeding 30
diskettes in one at a time. If you want to keep things "on the level,"
license-wise, you could trade me a CD copy for the floppies.
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rcurl
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response 23 of 59:
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Dec 10 21:10 UTC 1999 |
Hmmm...I have an external CD drive and maybe even PC software for it...
I still have to check some things, and find a cheap RAM card first. But
thank you for the offer.
That question of compatible drivers was one thing worrying me, since
there are PCMCIA cards with the ThinkPad and I don't have the drivers
on separate software, nor much idea at the moment if they are WIN 95
compatible.
Microsoft doesn't list Win95 as available at all, on their website.
I will look at some ham or computer 'show' for an original copy first.
Then I might get off the level.... I didn't understand what you meant
by to trade a CD copy: don't you have two licenses if you have both
the floppies and the CD?
I've been spoiled by the ease of system upgrades on Mac.
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scott
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response 24 of 59:
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Dec 10 21:33 UTC 1999 |
The alternative to installing from floppies is to put (in DOS) a Win95
directory on the hard disk, somehow transfer all the CD-Rom files into it,
and then run setup.exe. The Win95 CD can actually be broken up into floppies,
too, the bulk of the files are in .cab compressed format to fit onto floppy
disks.
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