From: martin@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32
Subject: using NT - lots of questions!
Date: 24 Jul 92 21:49:07 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England

Hello everybody!
  I'm surprised how little discussion there has been about the NT pre-release
so far - maybe everyone is just using it!

  Anyway I have some questions, and comments: :-)

Is there any documentation on regedit? I'm afraid I can't work it out! I can
just about understand what I see there, but not a clue what might be sensible
edits to make to it! (and what edits will kill everything! :-)

How do I add/remove/review device drivers? I found an entry in the user porfile
editor for `can add and remove device drivers' but if I enable this for my
user profile (or admin) I get:

		LAN Manager error 3221225485 occured

and nothing changes (BTW, can LAN Manager *really* fail in over 3 billion ways?
Please tell me this is an address! :-)
I have a feeling that If I can get this to work, it will unlock lots of other
things! Could it be failing because there isn't a driver for my ethernet card
(can I vote for an NE1000/2000 driver? I'm sure lots of people have them!) and
so I didn't install the network stuff - much as I'd *love* to have TCP/IP.

I have a SoundBlaster Pro compatible card - a pro audio spectrum 16, and would
like to see if it will work - as a SBpro.

I keep on running out of memory, when I have more than a couple of programs
running - in particular I've noticed file manager taking several megabytes(?)
when it reads the index of very large directories - eg \i386\winnt on the
distribution CDROM. Now I've got a 20Mbyte swap file, and 13Mbytes free on
that device for it to grow (and I have seen it grow and shrink alittle), but
my compilations, etc still fail, running out of far heap, or just failing to
run. Is this normal?

When the document said the swap file must be at least 20Mbytes I thought that
must be to give room for lots of things to run, but just booting seems to
take most of it! Now I realize that the `real' release is supposed to need
less memory (I didn't think I'd see my 16Mbyte machine paging madly!), I hope
it is 'substantially' less!

winword is terribly slow, also how do I add things to the OLE registry?
Also I've had patchy success running normal DOS programs from the command line,
they sometimes run, but then when they exit, hang. But when I just tried it
again it seemed to work fine, although I saw the start-up of dosx, which I
don't remember seeing before!

(Is information like this in the printed docs? Apart from the API docs, there
seems to be an absence of on-line documentation about the system - am I missing
something obvious? There are alot of places to hide on a CDROM :-)
There is, of course, lots of compiler-related documentation)

I also can't get multi-boot to work - it boots NT fine, but if I try to boot
the underlying system (DOS 5), it gives the "this is not a system disk, or
disk read error message, hit any key to re-boot' message. I don't really care
because I've got a DOS 5 boot disk that re-directs everything to C:, but
it isn't right.

On a more positive note:

Apart from the speed of 16-bits windows, this release is incredibly impressive!
The installation was a wheeze - helped by the fact that I'm lucky, and have a
supported CDROM, on a supported SCSI interface (they came together!)

Although the installation guide is abit coy when it says that is won't work
with OS/2 v2.0's boot manager - what they really mean is that the install
program *will hang* if boot manager is present!

I can't wait to see the September release!

Martin
INTERNET: martin@minster.york.ac.uk
JANET:  martin@uk.ac.york.minster
surface:
        Dr. Martin C. Atkins
        Dept. of Computer Science
        University of York
        Heslington
        York YO1 5DD
        ENGLAND
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32