🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1761@homxb.UUCP> gritz@homxb.UUCP (R.SHARPLES) writes:
>I have just finished fooling around with desqview, and i was not 
>really impressed.  

I too just finished fooling around with Desqview.  I was impressed.

>                   It does do multitasking in the true sense of the 
>word so you could be downloading data from a mainframe in one window and 
>doing something else in another.  But it does this by allocating "ticks"
>to each window: there are 18 ticks a second and if a background window gets
>nine of them then each dos process will slow by one half (if there are two 
>processes running).  I think this is how it works, I only fooled with it
>for about an hour.

How else do you expect to get multitasking on a single processor machine?  
Sure, it slows down as you add processes, but you don't get something for 
nothing.  If you want a background process to get a lower priority, you can
configure Desqview to allocate fewer ticks to it.  Oh and by the way,
communications in the background, let's see Windows do that (that is if you
can wait for them to release their comm program .... Desqview lets you use
your own.)


>One thing that really annoyed me was the interface, Desqview wants you to
>run all applications from a list of "installed" software.  It then opens up a 
>window and runs the application.  DOS is one of these applications.  If you
>run DOS from Desqview and then in DOS run a program with graphics (like Xtree)
>the program will try to over-write the Desqview graphics.  The results are 
>an unpredictiable mess.  Usually the process hung and you had to reboot from 
>hardware.  

True.  But once you have installed the program (which isn't as difficult as it
may seem) correctly (i.e. tell it if writes to the screen directly, uses 
graphics modes, can't run in the background), it should be ok.  If you don't
want to install every program, than don't.  Simply install a version of DOS
(installation merely defines parameters - it does not load the program into
memory) that has a superset of all of the correct parameters for the programs
you want to run within that window and then run those programs under dos as
usual in its own window.  True you may not be able to run these programs 
concurently in the background (i.e. in a non-full screen window) but you will
be able to jump back and forth between other programs (and even copy blocks
of data from them)  (By the way, Desqview does not load in addtional copies
of DOS; it uses the one thats already in memory.)  Desqview comes with
PREDEFINED INSTALLATIONS for many of the commercial programs available.


>Also I have a 6300 with 640K and was unable to run both PCWrite and Xtree
>with out one process or the other hanging (requiring reboot).  

Oh yeah?  How did you have them installed?  If they both write directly to the
screen, then they probably need to be installed a "run only in foreground".
By the way, DesqView swaps processes to disk if it needs the extra memory!


>                                                                I will play
>with it some more but I am going to definately check out MS Windows.  

Windows is incredably slow on a PC/XT.  It really needs an AT w/an EGA.
(And lets see it do comm in the background ... today ... with ProComm.)


>                                                                     I have
>also seen a reference on the net to something called Polywindows that someone
>received with a board.  If anyone else has experience or advice to offer, I
>would be very interested.

Polywindows is a memory resident desktop type programs (i.e. Sidekick).
Desqview comes bundled w/ AST's boards.


All in all, its a good product.  Very compatable with your existing software,
good performance on a PC (try typing a document in windows), and not too
much demand on your memory (o.k. so you'll probably want 640k and I'm getting
tempted to buy some expanded memory).  I originally planned on using it for
doing downloads in the background.  Now, I'm not so sure. (exchanging data 
amongst programs, editing while compiling ...)  Time will tell.



-- 
Eric A. Raymond                                   UUCP: ...decvax!mcnc!duke!ear