Windows 95 .. my experinces

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

I have been using Windows 95 for months now as part of the
"select"  400000 testers :-). Prior to that I had a fling
with OS/2. Bottom line, anyone want a OS/2 real cheap --
like free and maybe even anyone want to buy a used MAC.


I started running WI95 on a Toshiba 3400CT with a 30mh 486
and 12 megs of memory. It ran acceptably essentially the
same speed to my eye as my Du0 230. I now run it on a
Toshiba 610CT -- a 90 meh Pentium with 8 megs of memory
(Toshiba is not yet shipping memory addons). Performance is
very good except under the MS Exchange where it does a disk
diagnostic (it tries wear testing). All other apps run very
well.


I consider it a lot more stable than MACOS and incredibly
more stable than OS2. There are bugs. Sometimes processes
go into background and dont appear on the taskbard and I
have not understood how to find them again. But it is one
of the most bug free betas I have used and the Gold version
(the one that goes on sale on Thursday) seems rock solid to
me with at least Eudora, Netscape, the MS Office Suit and
even PGP.


The TCP stack also seems very good. It came up and works.


As to Microsoft Network .. well it is AOL ish with some
improvements. I have tried to use the internet access but
their dial in numbers seem to hang on trying to get
authorization done.


As I said at the beginning it has moved an old MAC lover to
thinking of giving the MAC to my sons and getting a BIG
Pentium.


Dave