🚀 go-pugleaf

boltz@chopin.psu.edu (Mark Boltz) writes:

>Having used a copy of OS/2 2.0 (the final release) on a friend's 386DX-25, I
>must say that IBM has come a long way, but have some stuff to work out.  Even
>tho the machine had 8MB, it was almost constantly swapping stuff to disk when
>asked to do more than about 4 tasks at once.  (At least it has multi-tasking.)

I have it running on a 386-25, with 8Mb, with no excessive swapping.
What sort of tasks were you attempting?

>The biggest problem I have with this, aside from wear and tear, is the swap
>file created grows as applications are started, but won't shrink after closing
>them; rather only after shutdown.  Another small problem I noticed, that IBM

Fixed- long ago. It was one of the first bug-fixes to be released.

>should be correcting already from what I understand, is the incompatability withthe new Windows 3.1.  Some newer programs had real problems running in a
>OS/2 WIN window.  Plus, OS/2 being a 'protected' system (so one crash doesn't

Thats coming out with the 'fall' update. Whats more, it will STILL run
all of the stuff that breaks under 3.0 (like WinWord 1.0, for example),
plus all of the old win 2.x stuff. Better than microsoft managed!

>crash all the progs), you run into problems with programs that want to manage
>memory (like Windows in Extended mode).  The BOOT manager is nice, but does
>it really have to take up a whole 1MB of space?

It handles anything DPMI compliant. Windows was SUPPOSED to be-
Microsoft wrote the standard, and specified that DPMI servers were
supposed to 'ask' and see if a higher level server was giving THEM
memory before they grabbed everything. They ignored that when they wrote
windows- thats why IBM shipped an improved version of windows with OS/2.
(WinOS/2 also has a lot of the interapplication protection thats
Microsoft is making such a hoo-ha about in 3.1).
	The boot manager takes up 1Mb not because it is that large, but
because the new 'user friendly' FDISK program only allows partitions on
1Mb boundaries. Thats pretty silly, I will admit!

>And the video drivers (only available at the time was 600x320) suck.  Get some
>people to get some decent drivers for the popular graphics cards like the
>Diamond Stealth and Tseng ET4K.

	There ARE some ET4000, Trident, ATI, and other SVGA drivers out
now, allowing 1024x768x256, plus other flavours. I don't know about most
of them, but the et4000 ones are pretty slow. Nobody is too keen on
improving them right now, because the new 32 bit graphics engine is
coming out soon, and will allow 32 bit code in the drivers. IBM is
apparently shipping the update with generic SVGA drivers for most of the
major chipsets.

	Andrew Williams,
	Physics, Uni of Western Australia.