After over a year w/ Warp3, I recently installed the Warp4 upgrade. After 2 days with Warp4, I went back to Warp3. The installation went relatively well, but the resulting operating environment was unacceptable.
I am self-employed as a desktop systems consultant dealing primarily with small businesses. In that world, WINDOWS is a real and substantial fact if for no other reason than certain necessary software available only within that operating environment. I am a general user who considers himself of average technical abilities. I have sufficient understanding to track IRQ/DMA/PORT conflicts, set jumpers, etc. I built my system from components generally based on a need/cost basis. I use dual-boot with the FAT type file system rather than dedicated OS/2 because I sometimes need to duplicate users' systems setups at my home office in order to resolve client operation questions. I have a 486/40DX w/ 16MB RAM and . Warp3 runs fine on my system, but Warp4 seems to require more resources and my system, while slightly slower in OS2 sessions, is noticeably slower during WIN-OS2 sessions. Although I am planning to upgrade my motherboard/CPU, replacing WINDOWS programs is not an option.
Although Warp4 is extensively documented, such documentation is largely unavailable until after a successful installation. I wish IBM had put the documentation on one of the extra CD-ROM's for review prior to installation. The enclosed documentation and read-me files on the CD-ROM's give only a small hint of what installers may have to wrestle with.
I had previously modified my Warp3 CONFIG.SYS file in a fairly standard manner (ie: grouping BASEDEV's, etc.) to improve startup speed. When I tried the same approach with Warp4, I began to get a number of "unable to install . . . ", "press enter to continue" messages as the system loaded. The why of all this points to more fundamental changes in the core elements of the upgrade than I had believed were there from what I had been reading in the press (ie: OS/2 Magazine) and certainly more than is covered in the installation materials.
I've reinstalled Warp3 for now.
I've been throughly happy with Warp3, but, while I may reinstall Warp4 in the future, I'll wait for something like "Warp4 Unleashed" to be published so that I can get a clear idea of what I'm letting myself in for. That's something I missed the first time. For now "Merlin" stays in his box.
Before I begin, I would like to sya that I have been an avid OS/2 supporter since version 2.1. I felt at that time, IBM had created a truly progressive OS -- multi-threaded, 32-bit, long filenames -- the whole nine yards. Since then, I must say that I have been very disappointed with OS/2.
I eagerly awaited the arrival of OS/2 Warp 4. I had had a number of serious crashing problems with OS/2 Warp.
Warp 4 came, and I was all excited. I backed up my hard drive, slid in the first disk and the CDROM, and away we went. I have DPT SCSI adapter which has worked flawlessly under previous versions of OS/2. Yet, when I attempted to boot the "new" Warp, it said I had no hard drives or CDROM. Turns out the geniuses at IBM who wrote the driver forgot that the DPT can emulate an IDE controller if need be. So OS/2 thought I had an IDE hd, when I didn't.
The whole installation process took about 8 hours start to finish. I was not giving IBM kudos for a "improved" install process.
The first thing I noticed [after installation] was how sluggish it was. It used to take the WPS abt a minute maybe two to load up. It now takes about 5.
I feel that IBM dropped the ball with Warp 4. VoiceType is a neat idea, but I don't nor can I afford the hardware for it. A P100 with 48 megs of RAM is way too steep. I can type faster than it can dictate. The Java support is neat, but it barebones. I wish they had just waited for VisualAge for Java, and shipped a good, working product.
I hate Win95 like everyone else, but there are a few things to be learned from it. In particular, it does have a nice interface, and its hardware manager is quite nice. OS/2's hardware manager is too crpytic to do any good. Finally, the best software runs in Windows 95. I don't want to run Word from 2 years ago when I can the latest Word with a lot of important features that aren't in 6. Furthermore, Word95 runs a whole lot faster in 95 than 6 does under OS/2.
Unfortunately, I am stuck with Win95 because OS/2 Java implement does work correctly, Warp 4 is too sluggish, and it fails to support my network card. I feel very let down by IBM, and regretfully say that I am now looking towards Windows NT to offer the very features I had hoped would come from OS/2.
John Burwell
I first entered [the computer banking] world in 1992. A large bank in St. Louis offered it via Prodigy. Since I already subscribed to Prodigy, it seemed logical to give it a go. I loved the concept from the first. In fact, when I moved to Atlanta, I looked for a bank with similar programs. None to be found. So, until this year, my banking was done in St. Louis via PC.
This year, I left that St. Louis bank for a "virtual bank" based in Kentucky. They use a secure server on the Internet rather than any proprietary software. Thus, your editorial regarding banks catering to any one OS or the other is actually a bit outdated. I believe the concept of Internet banking is on the verge of exploding. It won't matter which OS one has as long as one has a secure browser and a connection.
Who knows? We may someday have some forward thinking politicians NOT financed by large banking interests who will say, "Hey, let's let people bank whereever they want... even in Canada!"
Many ATMs are basically PCs; comp.risks has reported at least one instance where someone walked up and found what appeared to a DOS prompt (although it could have been an OS/2 prompt as well). The keypads returned numbers, buttons letters, etc!
In reference to your Q&A article: You said, that it is possible to defragment HPFS disk using some utilities. I disagree. This works only if you have unfragmented space on your disk. If you have no continuous space on your disk the defragmentation process works all the time without any success.
I have a 1.6G partition under HPFS, and after 1 year of intensive working with it I've tried to defragment it using GammaTech Utilities' OPTIMIZE. It worked for about 18 hours (!!!) and I had to stop it, because I had to do my job.
So, I see only one way to defragment a HPFS disk if there is no large unfragmented space on it: back all information up, reformat HPFS-disk, then restore backed-up information.
I currently run OS/2 and use Lotus 123 for Windows regularly. The primary reason I have to run Windows is 123. I needed 123 ver 4 or 5 for OS/2 8 months ago. MS will have Excel 97 out before a new 123 for OS/2. Regardless of excuses, the fact is they are way too late and they shouldn't even bother anymore.
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