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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.
59 responses total.
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.
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.
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> )
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.
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." :-)
- 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.
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.
Nope. I already have that. It's just ST01 / 02 installation guide. No drivers.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.!
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).
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?
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
All I can say about Win95 is that I hate its concept of desk top and "drilling down" to application programs, so I run Program Manager "on top of it", thank you very much.
Do what I do, and assign Ctrl-Alt- hotkey combinations to applications. It changed my life for the better! (well, it did, but not by a whole lot).
Re #23: Well, my CD copy isn't quite legal. I figure morally (though probably not technically) I'm okay, since I had a license for the floppy version. If you have an external CD drive that works with the laptop, make a DOS boot disk with the drivers for it. Then hook it up, boot the machine off the floppy, stick in the Win95 CD, and run SETUP. The only problem you may run into is that after the reboot phase of the install, if Win95 doesn't recognize the CD-ROM drive it'll complain it can't find files it's trying to install. In that case, you can usually cancel it, install the Win95 CD-ROM drivers, then manually install the stuff you're missing. (Usually it's just printers and networking.) I've installed Win95 off Zip disk this way.
Wow, I just read back through this item. It's odd reading my praises of Windows 95. I don't touch Microsoft products when I can avoid them these days.
Rane, I have a perfectly legal copy of Win 95 that I'd be willing to give you. Send me mail so we can work out the kinks. You can run Win95 in an 8M environment, though it is a little slow. I'm using it on my 486 and I pretty much like it.
...."kinks"...I'm hoping for no "kinks... :) Re #28: I thought someone would enjoy the reinvigoration of a thread from 1995.. 8^}
What kinks? You'll come by the house and pick it up.
Sorry. "work out the kinks" sounded a little ominous. I will be in touch via mail. I still need to line up that IC DRAM card to up my RAM. You'd think they'd be cheap, since the computer is obsolete. Are there web sites to search for second-hand RAM cards? I would think they would last longer than what they go into, so should be in surplus.
You can run Win 95 in a 8M environment. I do. I sort of like it. I guess you want to *love* it, right?
Hmm. I remember running Win95 on a 486 with 16M, and hating how slow it was.
Well, I don't want to intentionally punish myself running Win 95. I have need of it to run programs that won't run in Win3.1. And, how much RAM does one need for Netscape with Win95?
I'd consider 16M the minimum. It'll run in 8, but it's very frustrating because of the long pauses as the hard drive thrashes, due to all the swapping it's forced to do.
OK, I'm opting for 20 when I can find a 16mb IC DRAM card. Got one for this machine? 8^}
Got the card! (See item 48.) Now, I want to check compatibility of Win95 with the PCMCIA cards in the machine....hmmmm, what's the best way to do that?
If the manufacturers still exist, you could go to their web sites and look for Win95 drivers. I believe (someone can correct me if I'm wrong) that most PCMCIA modems are supported natively by Win95, and don't need special drivers. The same is true of many network cards; my 3com Etherlink III PCMCIA card is supported natively.
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- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss