🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <344CFD22.5D17F764@mistralk.co.uk>,
Andrew Holmes <andyholmes@mistralk.co.uk> wrote:
|I've been using win95 for the last 18months and have just gone over to
|OSR2. Is there any benefit of going to OS/2, and will my current Win'95
|software like office'97 still work?

It all depends on what is important to you.

Windows 95 software will not work under OS/2, but there are many
major advantages running Warp 4 instead of Windows 95 if your hardware
is of a suitable quality. The benefits are mainly in a much higher 
reliability - roughly the same as you would see if you upgrade to
Windows NT, with some give and some take depending on actual hardware
and usage patterns - and in a much better user interface. Wether the
difference is worth the trouble, depends on your own needs and desires.

OS/2 is not really worthwhile unless you reformat to use the HPFS
file system, just like you should reformat to NTFS if you want to run
NT. This is very important both for performance and reliability. The
file systems used by Windows 95 are not adequate for any kind of
serious use. OS/2 will make effective use of hardware which does
not offer much of an advantage under Windows 95, like SCSI devices
on bus-mastering adapters and RAM above 32MB. It does not work any
better than Windows with PIO-mode ATA-2 IDE drives, but does exploit 
Ultra ATA-3 DMA drives. It works much better when you have many drives
in the system, and is excellent for any kind of networking. It works 
poorly with things that are connected to the printer port if they are
not printers, and will not support "Windows printers". It is really
excellent on Pentium Pro systems, which are slow under Windows
but faster than the more expensive Pentium II under OS/2.