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Computers
& Technology . Do
You Do Windows?
The first machine I ever got my hands on was a TI -- a Texas Instruments machine hooked up to an old B&W TV and a GE cassette recorder that functioned as the storage medium. Aside from the occasional game of Pong, most of the time spent on it meant writing short, simple programs in BASIC, little routines of > IF >THEN >GOTO. ... Needless to say, things have changed. ... These days, for most home PC users, and even many home office and small business users, the question of which operating system [OS] to use is usually answered by default. The answer most often depends on what type of machine you've bought -- a PC or a Mac -- and then on how old it is. If you bought a Mac, then you have some version of the Mac OS. If you bought a PC, then it's a pretty safe bet that you have a Microsoft OS. ... And if you have Microsoft, then unless you're running a machine that's more than six years old, you probably have some version of Windows. Windows has come a long way from its earliest incarnation. Lots of you will probably remember when Microsoft first made the leap from the text-based DOS operating system to Windows -- its first GUI [Graphical User Interface] operating system. The original Windows was supposed to make PC's as user-friendly as the Mac had always been, since the GUI meant icons & shortcuts, and 'multi-tasking' {i.e., having several programs open and running at once}, as well as drag 'n' drop functionality for files and more. Windows 3.x
Windows 3.x belonged to the 286 & 386 generation of PC's, the first that made it possible to get past the old DOS limit of 640k of memory. This generation of PC's was built on 30-pin memory modules, and also housed 16-bit ISA slots, the ones you plug your hardware cards into. The old 386's also saw some early attempts at changing slot architecture, for example, with VESA-local bus -- a 16-bit slot with an extra 'tail' that was supposed to beef up video graphics. Every new device added to a Windows 3.x machine required changes to two files CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT -- holdovers from the DOS days. The first essentially told Windows what devices to look for, what files were associated with them, and how to address them; the latter told Windows what system files to load, and in what order, as well as any other software that needed to be loaded. In addition, Windows 3.x was also dependent on changes written to other critical files, especially WIN.INI {short for Windows initialization}, SYS.INI {system initialization}, and, for software, PROGMAN.INI {the Program Manager initialization file}. Many devices, as well as most software programs, had their own setup or installation routines that made the changes to these files automatically. But the reality of hardware and software installation under Windows 3.x was not so simple. Adding new hardware under Windows 3.x often meant having to configure the add-on cards themselves, usually through dip switches or by using jumpers, in order to assign an IRQ to the device. If more than one device tried to use the same IRQ, the result was that, at the least, the hardware wouldn't be recognized by Windows, or, worse, Windows wouldn't even boot up. Of course, sometimes the problem was a little more subtle, and meant having to change the order of the lines in CONFIG. SYS, or find and change a line in one of the initialization files. We made the transition from DOS 6.2 to Windows 3.1.1 somewhat reluctantly, back in '94, though we always kept a machine running DOS 6.2 without Windows 3.1.1 loaded. We were not all that impressed. Windows 95 Windows 95 was touted as the first "plug 'n' play" OS from Microsoft. The plug 'n' play principle was simple. Instead of having to wrestle new hardware into submission, you simply plugged it in and let Windows 95 do the work. The concept was a good one. More and more add-on cards made use of the new Windows technology. And even though some cards still required you to set switches or jumpers, the old IRQ conflicts were much less frequent under Windows 95. But Windows 95's plug 'n' play feature was often derided as plug 'n' pray, and for good reason. As switches and jumpers disappeared from the add-on cards, so, too, did any way of changing the settings manually on the card. So, if you plugged but weren't able to play, you were now dependent on trying to change settings from within Windows itself. That would have been simple enough, and, often enough, was. But nearly as often, the new hardware problem could keep Windows from booting up in the first place. In that case, there was usually little alternative to either doing without the card, or removing just about everything except your video card, then adding -- one card at a time ... and booting up with each add-on -- until you found the problem card. And as if that weren't bad enough, sometimes the only solution was to try adding cards in a different order in order to be able to get everything to work. In addition to these problems, Windows 95 was a fairly unstable OS. Numerous reports of system crashes came down the pike. But Microsoft was actually already working on an up-grade to the new OS even as the original hit the market. The newer version -- called OSR2 -- came out not long after the original Windows 95. But there were a number of things about it that, especially for what was coming along in the hardware world, made all the difference. For starters, the OSR2 version could handle the new FAT32 format for hard disks. This meant that the newer, larger hard disks could be formatted without having to create more than one partition; but it also meant more efficient use of disk space, since the minimum space taken -- even by something as seemingly innocuous as a folder name -- was now about 1/4th the space it had taken under the older FAT16. But even more importantly, the newer version of Windows 95 also was the first that could handle the then-emerging USB [Universal Serial Bus] devices, the first genuine, relatively glitch-less plug 'n' play hardware that meant not only fewer hardware headaches, but also meant not even having to reboot the machine to plug the new hardware in, or unplug it for that matter. Windows
98 No question, Windows 98 did handle some things a little better. For example, with its more thorough integration between Windows and Internet Explorer, it managed to be suffciently confusing to prolong the Justice Department lawsuit against Microsoft. But the fact is, we by-passed Windows 98 completely. And for anyone running at least Win 95 OSR2, we see absolutely no need to change to Win 98. Windows NT Why? ... Simple. As we started to up-grade our software development programs -- specifically, with Visual Studio 6.0 -- we ran into an absolute wall with Windows 95. One of the critical system files actually had built into it {for no really good reason that we could ever discover} a 64k file size limit. Of course, what Microsoft originally planned at NT 5.0 was supposed to be the first step in bringing together the Windows 9x and NT families into one integrated operating system. Slowly but slowly, NT 5.0 evolved into Windows 2000, and the two OS's remained distant cousins, with different code base and architecture. NT 4.0 was a reasonable OS for Microsoft's foray into the network OS world -- a game to which it came rather late, well behind Novell and others. But Microsoft's unparalleled resources, for which read, money, has allowed them not only to get into the network market, but to dominate it for newer small business systems and many enterprise businesses, as well. Windows
2000
Windows 2000 -- both the Server and Professional [client] versions -- proved significantly more crash-proof, easier to network, and even much better at genuine plug 'n' play than Windows 95 or {for our money} 98 ... not bad considering NT 4.0 didn't support plug 'n' play at all. We also installed a small business network built on Win2K last year and while there have still been occasional 3rd-party software issues, the operating system itself has yet to throw up a blue screen {i.e., a genuine system crash} in more than a year of operation. Here at the home office, too, where we have both the Server and Professional installed, the only blue screen we ever encountered with either actually ended up having to do with a faulty piece of hardware. Windows 2000, as you might expect, was even more resource-hungry than Windows 95 or NT 4.0. Even Microsoft admits that it's somewhat pointless to run it with less than 64meg of memory. And we'll second that. But for business workstations that don't have to do a lot of multi-tasking, it works fine at 64 meg. We actually installed Win2K Pro on several older Compaq Pro workstations with 64 meg of memory, Pentium Pro CPU's, and 2-4 gig hard drives -- with the expectation that they'd be running Peachtree Complete Accounting for Windows, the older DOS Peachtree, and probably an Office 97 app like Word or Excel at the same time. So far, so good. There have been no problems with system resources, which Win2K actually handles better than any of the previous incarnations of Windows. But we wouldn't want to push that kind of configuration much past those kinds of limits. What about plug 'n' play? Windows 2000 Pro has recognized all sorts of hardware configurations, including the addition of several different types of hard disks, including hot-plug disks on a server ... a variety of 10/100 LAN cards, including 3Com's and LinkSys cards ... a variety of internal & external 56k modems ... several CD burners, including IDE & SCSI ... several different scanners ... both home & business-class printers ... and other hardware as varied as an Olympus digital camera, a Creative Nomad II digital recorder, a USB Iomega Zip Drive, and much more. Not only that, but we've been able to hot-swap the USB devices without booting and without problems. As for software: There's still some software that hasn't been up-dated for Windows 2000. So before you consider migrating, if you have a program you have to run, you should check on compatibility first. ... The
Windows Future? As for the future of Windows itself? ... Windows ME is already out. But, with the possible exception of the new System Restore -- which supposedly allows you to recover from a bad crash in step-by-step fashion -- the other new features center around multimedia file handling and transmission, things that can be very easily accomplished with just about any other version of Windows from Win 95/OSR2 on. Of greater interest is the new Windows XP -- a new client {desktop, portable, workstation} system that sounds as if Microsoft is finally going to deliver on its original rumors that the Windows and NT families will be joined together. {The server version is code-named Whistler.} It's currently in testing, with Release Candidate 1 due out this summer. What new features does it promise that you won't find in any form in Windows 200 Pro? If you look through the Microsoft hype and filter out the features they list as "new" and not "improved" or "enhanced," it will have a few genuinely new things to offer. For example, System Restore will be there, as well as something called Device Driver Rollback, which will help you get back to a previously working driver automatically if the up-dated driver doesn't work. WinXP will also offer an Internet Connection Firewall, to help small business users and others put a little more protection between their network and the rest of the world. Smart Card Support will also be integrated, as well as a couple of remote apps --- Remote Assistance, which allows someone else on a network to share control of a PC, primarily for torubleshooting purposes ... and Remote Desktop, which will allow mobile users to access and use their desktop machine when they're on the road, meaning portables wouldn't have to be as hefty. All in all though, there's not enough new in XP for our purposes that would have us give up Windows 2000 Pro at this point. On the other hand, a subsequent release of XP, as well as the Whistler server -- already slated for testing and set to release with Intel's new Itanium chip -- will actually be the first 64-bit Microsoft OS. That may be something to consider down the road. But if you're at all cost-conscious -- about operating systems, hardware, or just about anything else in this tech world -- you're almost always better off staying a little bit behind the curve. After all, it was only about five or six years ago that a Pentium 166 with 16 meg of ram and a 2 gig hard drive would've cost you around $1200 - $1500 ... and that would've been a bargain. .. ******* ******* If you would like to submit a feature for our Computers & Tech section, don't hesitate to let us know. Simply e-mail us at comptech@downstreetmagazine.com. The e-mail should contain your name, address, and a phone number where we can reach you. You may also send a copy of your proposed article. The text can either be included in the body of the e-mail, or you can send it as an attachment in just about any word processing format. If your piece is accepted, we will pay a small honorarium for your interest & your time. [See Freelancers Wanted for more details.] ******* ******* If you would like to advertise in this section, or throughout the magazine, please visit our Advertising Info Pages ... or call, write, or e-mail ads@downstreetmagazine.com. ******* *******. |
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In
the earliest days of commercially available home computers, variety was the
spice of life. There were TI 99/4A's ... Commodore 64's and Vic-20's
... Atari 400's ... Tandy's ... Apple ]['s ... and
more. ... 
With
the advent of the 486 and Pentium-class systems, Microsoft released it's first
version of Windows 95. The 486 and Pentium-class machines saw the
introduction of the first 32-bit slots -- the shorter, faster PCI -- as
well as 72-pin memory modules. Of course, Windows 95 was much more
resource-hungry -- both in terms of memory and in the amount of disk space
required for an installation. In fact, we considered 32 meg the absolute
minimum for running Windows 95; and we never did run into a limit of how much
memory it could actually make use of, though we only ever got as high as 128 meg
of RAM.