Autor: Piotr Plociennik (PIOTRP%PLPUAM11.AMU.EDU.PL_at_plearn.edu.pl)
Data: Mon 03 Jul 1995 - 10:50:33 MET DST
Witajcie
Wiadomosc ta pochodzi z listy ASIS-L_at_UIUCVMD.BITNET (American Society
for Information Science). Mam nadzieje, ze bedzie ona interesujaca
dla dyskutantow bioracych udzial w wojnie OS/2 / Windows'95.
Pozdrowienia
Piotr
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FIRST LOOKS
Publication Date: March 27, 1995 (Vol. 17, Issue 13)
Copyright (c) InfoWorld 1995
Desktop operating system
Windows 95 beta fails to meet promises
Expect IS help-desk personnel to lose bushels of hair when
existing drivers cause Windows 95 installations to crash.
By Nicholas Petreley
Corporate customers who have outgrown Windows 3.1 and are waiting for Windows
95 to come to the rescue could be in for countless problems and a colossal
disappointment. I just received what Microsoft Corp. is calling the last
beta of Windows 95. And although it has some improvements over Windows 3.1,
it perpetuates many of the existing problems and doesn't live up to the
grandiose promises set by Microsoft.
Among those promises are easy installation, greater reliability, performance
equal to or better than Windows 3.1, real 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking, a
friendly and more powerful desktop, and compatibility with existing MS-DOS
and 16-bit Windows applications. This current beta falls short in every
category.
Install we trust
Beta M8 installs with fewer problems than the last beta I tested, but
installation still isn't trouble-free by a long shot. You can run the
Windows 95 installation program from an existing copy of Windows. This makes
it fairly easy to upgrade your users over the network, and it will be the
preferred method for ease of use. But it could also be one of Windows 95's
greatest vulnerabilities.
When you install Windows 95 over an existing copy of DOS and Windows, it
inherits all of the network drivers, device drivers, and utilities that are
loaded in your CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and SYSTEM.INI files -- even the
ones it won't need or can't work with.
It left in all of my memory manager, network, CD-ROM, and Sound Blaster
drivers, even though Windows 95 properly sniffed out and loaded its own
drivers for these features. Redundancy like this won't always bring Windows
95 down, but it will eat up a lot of conventional RAM for DOS sessions.
An OS must know its limits
Unfortunately, the RAM most precious to Windows 95 is the tiny portion it
allocates for Windows resources. That's one reason Windows 95 will prove to
be as unreliable as Windows 3.1. I quickly ran out of resources on my 486
with 32MB of RAM when simply running the 32-bit version of Microsoft Word for
Windows 6.0 and exploring the Microsoft Network -- and believe me, there
isn't that much of the Microsoft Network to explore.
It is preposterous enough that a 32-bit multitasking operating system would
run out of resources with 32MB of RAM simply by running too many applications
or having too many folders open. Once resources dip below 10 percent,
everything slows to a crawl, some programs stop working, and others can
exhibit bizarre behavior. Once or twice, when resources went to zero,
Windows 95 froze hard.
The irony of this is that it will be the multitasking, the new
folder-oriented desktop, and the best-written Windows 95 applications that
exhaust the resources. Word isn't resource hungry, because it's simply the
single-threaded, 16-bit version recompiled for 32-bit operation. Microsoft
Network, though, is designed to take advantage of Windows 95's multithreading
to let you do several things on the network at a time, so it eats resources
like candy. Good luck to all those ISVs building for Windows 95 who are
doing the same.
A riveting performer
This beta is unusable when using 4MB of RAM. It is uncomfortably slow on my
33-MHz 486DX with 8MB of RAM. And it is excruciatingly slow on a 25-MHz
486SX with 8MB when it runs off a disk compressed with Stac Electronics
Inc.'s Stacker, because the compression forces Windows 95 into using
real-mode disk access. You'll have to start with 12MB and add memory to work
comfortably.
The Windows 95 beta is downright snappy on my 66-MHz 486DX2 and 90-MHz
Pentium, both with 32MB of RAM. But neither machine is fast enough to
compensate for its poor multitasking. My copy of cc:Mail Remote for DOS
works fine as a foreground application, but it simply times out and fails to
exchange messages when I run it in the background, even when I set the CPU
idle sensitivity for the DOS session to its lowest setting.
Windows 95 has performance dropouts, which were most typically manifested by
the display not being able to keep up with my typing. Don't bother
formatting any floppies or doing any other intensive floppy access if you
want to get any work done in another application. Some operations in 16-bit
applications lock the CPU and don't let you switch to another application
until they're done. And forget about liberal use of OLE. Not only is OLE a
system resource hog, but OLE performance in Windows 95 is horrendous. Typing
within a Word for Windows OLE object that's embedded in a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet under Windows 95 is a torturous experience. This is clearly a
Windows 95 problem, because I can run the same 32-bit versions of Word and
Excel under Windows NT and not experience this lag-time typing problem in OLE
objects.
Windows 95's flaky behavior extends into its networking, too. Every time I
restarted Windows 95, it couldn't make up its mind about how it wanted to log
me into the network. I started it up one time, and it asked me for a
password for each server I use, and it automatically remapped to all the
servers and drives the way I had them set up last using the Network
Neighborhood utility. Then the next time I started Windows 95, it asked me
just once for my password and ran my NetWare log-in script and mapped the
drives according to that.
All that glitters is not gold
What can I say about the desktop that you haven't already read one hundred
times over? It's pretty.
And the relatively easy-to-use desktop is perhaps the biggest improvement
over Windows 3.1, although it falls far short of both the Macintosh desktop
and the OS/2 Workplace Shell in depth and functionality.
Microsoft has insisted since day one that the tendency of Windows 95's
shortcuts (icons that point to file objects) to get lost when you move a
file is a bug, not a design problem. If so, it's a bug Microsoft seems
unable to fix. Shortcuts still get confused if you move the files they point
to another directory -- and get hopelessly lost if you move them to another
drive. The only improvement in this beta is that Windows 95 will always ask
you before redirecting a shortcut to the wrong file. But it ends up pointing
to the wrong file, nonetheless.
As for compatibility, Windows 95 did run every application I threw at it but
not flawlessly. To name a few of the experiences: cc:Mail for Windows caused
frequent General Protection Faults; cc:Mail Remote for DOS repeatedly
displayed long lines of extraneous letters when addressing mail; and Lotus
Notes for Windows warned me it wouldn't run properly and then couldn't find
most of the servers on the network.
Some of these problems are bugs Microsoft may be able to fix, perhaps even by
its projected August ship date. But the most serious problems are design
flaws -- installation gotchas, inadequate performance, poor multitasking,
resource limitations, shallow desktop functionality, and woefully inadequate
error handling.
Windows 96?
I fear that unless Microsoft goes back to the drawing board on this operating
system, only light home users will get anything out of it. Corporate users
will gain more headaches than advantages for the investment in time and
hardware it will take to move from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. Given the
condition of the M8 beta, I cannot recommend such a move.
As for the resource problems in particular, Microsoft claims it can fix them
by moving the Windows class out of the 64KB user heap and into the 32-bit
address space. They even hand-delivered me a later build to prove it. This
build does, indeed, seem to let you do more before you run out of resources.
But there's a problem with this strategy. Operating system architecture is a
delicate balance of design decisions. When you poke them in one place, they
tend to pop out in another. And this later build is far less stable than the
M8 beta.
Since Microsoft has known about the resource problem for some months now, I
have to question why it is trying this fix on one of the most fundamental
aspects of the architecture after the release of what it is calling the
final beta. And if Microsoft does intend to make this change a part of the
shipping version of Windows 95, then the 400,000 people who participate in
this final beta will be reporting levels of stability and compatibility based
on a version of the operating system that no longer exists.
If you're committed to the Windows platform, and you're determined to move
your Windows 3.1 users to a 32-bit operating system, Windows 95 could turn
out to be one of the most compelling reasons to invest in the hardware
necessary to run Windows NT.
Opinion: Nope
Windows 95
Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash. (800) 426-9400, (206) 882-8080; fax: (206)
93-MSFAX
Price: Not announced.
Pros: Attractive interface; slightly better multitasking than Windows 3.1.
Cons: This beta doesn't live up to its billing in numerous categories.
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