From: bauwens@acs.ucalgary.ca (Luc Bauwens)
Subject: Re: Udell's complaints about the WPS in the August Byte.
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 92 03:04:23 GMT
Distribution: all
Organization: The University of Calgary, Alberta

In article <pathak-290792152306@virtual.mitre.org> pathak@mitre.org (Heeren Pathak) writes:
> 
>> 1) the WPS is prone to crashes
>
>In my experience, the WPS is reasonably stable.  It does crash once in a
>while, but the occurence are very far apart.  When a crash does occur, the
>WPS automatically starts up again so it really isn't a big deal.
 
I still experience about as many WPS crashes as I had in win3.0.  Often
when I start Softerm, after getting into the session manager and
having selected a phonebook entry, I get a crash that requires a
hard reboot (reset).  Happens about 5% to 10% of the time.  But it
may be hardware-related since I had a similar problem with win3.0 and 3.1.

As for the WPS starting up again automatically, *and I am talking
about crashes of the WPS and not of OS/2, thus such that a soft
boot works*, is there a way to set/change the time after which WPS
restarts?  Typically, a five minutes wait does not seem to work.
(Once, however, I had a WPS crash while downloading something in
Softerm.  I went to bed and the next morning, the download had
completed and WPS had restarted.  But I can't afford to go to
bed for the night each time the WPS crashes :-))

>I don't know if it is quite that slow but the WPS is slow and it is a real
>memory hog.  I would hope that the CSD has a "WPS Lite" that is faster and
>smaller.  
 
I think Windows has its GUI running at a higher priority than
applications, and that in Windows, backgrounded apps run at an even
lower priority.

So, the GUI being somewhat sluggish gives a feeling of slowness that may
be somewhat misleading.  As for running apps, I find that when running
one single cpu-intensive program with either OS/2 or 3.1 otherwise
unloaded, there is little difference.  For graphics, I seem to find
OS/2 slightly faster.  I haven't tried systematically running more than one
program.  But my impression is that there is a substantial deterioration 
with both 2.0 and 3.1, that is, two copies of the same program run
substantially slower that half the speed of each alone (but I got only
8 Megs, and swapping may be a factor).

As for the GUI, has it improved since the LA, or am I getting used
to it being sluggish?  (And BTW, I find HP-Vue on an HP9000/710 to be
even more sluggish.  But run a floating-point intensive stuff...)

Win-OS2 remains unacceptably slow.  But with the new HP laserjet
drivers, it has improved somewhat.  I hope that with the (formerly
June, now) September CSD, with the 3.1 stuff and a faster graphics
engine, it will finally be good enough to get rid of DOS and
Windows altogether (as other folks here, I still have DOS+3.1 
specifically to run WfW2.0a).

>Despite its problems, the I really love the WPS.  When OSs in beta, I was
>shopping for a new computer.  I really didn't want to get an Intel box but
>once I saw OS/2 (and the WPS), I ended up buying a 486.

But why, even after having applied the patch (IBM1FLPY), does my 360k
drive still misbehave?  It seems to think all diskettes are 
copy-protected.  Any clue?

Luc B


Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc