From: Lowey@Sask.USask.CA (Kevin Lowey)
Subject: Re: OS2 Good news and Bad news  (OS2 & a little windows too)
Originator: lowey@jester.usask.ca
Reply-To: lowey@jester.usask.ca
Organization: University of Saskatchewan
Distribution: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 04:45:51 GMT

From dic5340@hertz.njit.edu (David Charlap):
> yeates@rtsg.mot.com (Tony J Yeates) writes:

>>6) I asked them to run AMi Pro, my chosen word processor.  Oh dear
>>oh dear!  It was oh, so , slow to come up.  The rep. tried to cover up
>>by stepping up the talking - but it was too long for that.  It seemed
>>like about 4 minutes to load, but it was probably less.  It was
>>certainly embarrassingly and painfully slow.  The rep. said it had to
>>load a lot of things, DOS then windows, then AMI, but even so - it was
>>SLOW (remember 486 16M RAM ....).
> 
> That's a minor complaint of mine as well.  When you start an WIN-OS2
> session, you must start a DOS session, run the DOS session's
> AUTOEXEC.BAT file, and then run WINOS2.COM.  Once that's going, your
> application can load.  It can take a while in some cases.

Sure, but compare that to the time it takes when running DOS and you
have to press Control-Alt-Del.  Remember, OS/2 is booting a "foreign"
operating system (DOS), with a foreign windowing manager (MS-Windows),
to run a NON OS/2 application (your windows app).  However, it still
performs the VDM-boot, DOS boot and Windows boot faster than pressing
CONTROL-ALT-DEL on a DOS machine would.  And on the DOS machine, you
could only run ONE of these programs at a time.  I can have multiple
MS-Windows desktops in OS/2.

> 
> The rep should have had a WIN-OS2 session started in the background,
> and switch to it to launch AMI Pro.  It would have looked better that
> way...

No, that's a Microsoft trick (Lie in the demonstration).  

What the IBM rep SHOULD have done is show how slow it is loading
something like the CLOCK, explain what is happening, THEN load AMI Pro
as the second task to show that once WINOS2 is going, the other apps
load about the same speed (or faster because of HPFS) than in Windows.  

The rep could finish by explaining that if you put the Windows CLOCK
program in the startup folder, then WINOS2 would load automatically at
startup (in the background) so you wouldn't notice it.  The rep could
then show an OS/2 specific word-processor like Pagemaker or DeScribe
and show how it runs rings around the Windows version.

>>8)  No SVGA driver yet. Rep. claimed that their would be one/some.
> 
> There are many third party SVGA drivers.  Contact your board
> manufacturer.  I'm using SVGA modes on my ATI VGA-1024 board with no
> problems. 

I'm using my 800x600x16 Trident SVGA mode, with seamless windows just fine.

> 
>>10) Apparently a resource hog.
> 
> But there are enough resources that it's not a problem.  Under DOS, a
> 512K program is too big.  Under OS/2, it's not that significant.

Right.  OS/2 uses more initial resources, but once you have the
minimum, the resources available to programs are virtually unlimited.
This is because of OS/2's memory management and swapping.  This allows
me on an 8M machine to have many DOS boxes, each with 16M of extended
and 16M of expanded memory available to it, running in separate
windows on the desktop quite happily.

For me, the minimum is 8M of RAM, and about 10M of disk space free for
a swap file for when I run really large programs (i.e., programs that
DOS cannot even hope to run because the data structures are too large)

-- 
- Kevin Lowey (Lowey@Sask.USask.CA)
>>>>> Anonymous FTP to FTP.USASK.CA for DOS, OS/2, and Windows programs <<<<<

Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy