The Arsenal Files 4/The Arsenal Files 4 (Arsenal Computer).ISO/misc/win95os2.txt

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From: [e-mail] (Jeremy Reimer)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.jeremy-reimer,comp.os.os2.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy
Subject: OS/2 and Win95 unbiased comparison (long)
Date: 6 Mar 1995 23:42:31 -0800
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OS/2 Warp 3.0 and Windows 95 Beta 2 - an objective comparison
-------------------------------------------------------------

I. DISCLAIMER.

This document is copyright 1995 by Jeremy Reimer and may not be reproduced
in whole or in part without the express written or emailed consent of the
author.

I hate disclaimers.  But let me say this: I fall under no NDAs, I have no
hidden agendas, and I want both operating systems to succeed as much as
possible if only to keep both sides honest and competitive.  There is nothing
this industry needs less than a monopoly.  The purpose of writing this
document was to express the strengths and weaknesses of both products in
order to help people decide which system is right for them.

*NOTE: I have firmly decided on both.  I have my system partitioned to use
both Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp, which works quite well.  I guess I always did
want to have it all.


II. INTRODUCTION

To compare the two systems, I have divided this document into six sections:
Installation, Stability, Compatibility, Performance, Customization and Native
Applications.  My test system is my trusty old 486/33 with 8 megs of 70ns RAM,
a mid-range system slowly creeping into the low end as technology marches on.
Note that I fully intend to upgrade to a Pentium-90 with 16 megs later this
year if for no other reason than to run Wing Commander III better.  However,
my system is a fairly good test bed for Win 95, as it is probably close to
the majority of systems out there today that will be considering upgrading
to a new operating system.

Additional hardware:

2 serial ports (one with a 16550AFN, but for reasons explained later I am
  unable to use this with my modem, which makes life difficult)
1 parallel,1 game port
Zoom V32bis 14.4k faxmodem (hooked up to Com1, the non-16550 one)
Ancient Darius 14" SVGA monitor (35kHz)
Hercules Dynamite Pro ET4000 W32i local-bus (VLB) graphics card 1 meg
Panasonic 562b double-spin CD-ROM drive
Sound Blaster Pro 2 8-bit sound card
Turtle Beach Maui 16-bit wavetable synthesizer sound card
Okidata OL400e 300dpi laser printer
Gravis analog joystick
Quantum 15ms 105meg IDE HD (1)
Quantum 13ms 245meg IDE HD (2) (partitioned into 100 and 145 megs)

III. THE TESTS

1) Installation:
      a) OS/2 WARP

To install Warp I backed up my HD (always a good idea) and formatted one
partition (HD 2-100meg) with my DOS disks.  I installed DOS and then
Windows 3.1 on this partition, tailoring Windows 3.1 to my configuration,
installing the Hercules video drivers and the Maui MIDI drivers (plus
Sound Blaster for the beeps and bings)

Then I rebooted putting in the OS/2 install disk and proceeded with the
OS/2 installation.  I chose the advanced install, since I wanted HPFS
and other goodies configured the way I wanted it.  The most confusing
part comes near the beginning, when you have to choose an installation
partition using OS/2's FDISK.  While I am a veteran at this (having
installed OS/2 2.0 and 2.1) I could imagine it being difficult for people
who are not familiar with disk partitioning.  However, the OS/2 installation
manual contains a very good (and lengthy) section on partitioning which
is much better than any I saw back in the DOS days (and OS/2's FDISK is
much, much easier to use than the DOS version)  I set Boot Manager to
choose between booting DOS (100 meg partition) or OS/2 Warp (145 meg)

After I had formatted the installation partition (145 megs) as HPFS, all
that remained was to stick the remaining disks in.  OS/2 automatically
detected my Sound Blaster Pro and Panasonic CD-ROM drive, as well as my
ET4000 W32 video card. At the appropriate time it asked for my Windows
disks which I inserted.  The desktop came up and everything was ready to
go.  I customized the desktop per my usual (changing the Shredder to a
256-color Nuke icon, etc) and changed the video resolution to 800x600 in
16-bit color.

One slightly confusing moment came when OS/2 asked for my refresh rate
mode setting program for my video card.  Having learned about refresh
rates I knew which program this was (SETCRT.EXE) but when it ran the screen
went blank and my monitor hissed for about 3 minutes.  At first I though
the machine had crashed but it finally worked its way through and set the
modes appropriately.

My OS/2 install took approximately 35 megs of disk space (not including any
of the Bonus Pack or the swapfile)


      b) Windows 95

The SETUP.EXE program on the install disk for the Win95 beta could not be
run under Win-OS/2 (it exited gracefully with a message saying to run it
under raw Windows)  I shut down OS/2 and rebooted DOS and ran Win 3.1.
Setup ran from Windows and asked me a few questions, then began installing.
It detected my HPFS partitions on drives D: and E: (105 and 145 meg HPFS
partitions) which regular DOS could not see, and said that I would not
be able to access these partitions from Win95.  Later in the install it
told me it was going to disable Boot Manager in order to complete the
install properly, but that I could restore it by booting from an OS/2
boot disk and running FDISK.  As I had everything backed up, I didn't worry
about this.

The installation program asked all the questions at the beginning.  Some
questions were strange but I dutifully answered all that I could.  Near the
beginning I was asked if I was using a network and replied no, but later in
the questioning I found myself in a network settings dialog of some sort.
Once all the questions were completed and optional components selected
(I did not install the Microsoft Network access package, as I will never
be using that online service) it was just a matter of feeding in disks.
Since Windows 95 uses only the FAT filesystem, it doesn't have to concern
itself with partitioning, making installation simpler but less flexible.
Windows auto-detected my Sound Blaster and CD-ROM drive, but could not
figure out my monitor type (I left it at unknown)  As with OS/2, I had
to run SETCRT.EXE to get it to run properly at 800x600x16bit, but what I
did not know is that SETCRT had to be run BEFORE Windows 95 in order for
it to work (I could not just run it in a DOS session like in OS/2)  I
put SETCRT.EXE in my AUTOEXEC.BAT and all was fine on the next boot.

As predicted, I was able to restore Boot Manager by using the first 2
disks of OS/2 Warp to boot to an OS/2 command line and then run FDISK.
I didn't have to DO anything in FDISK, just run it and Boot Manager
was back.  Now I can choose between OS/2 and Win95 at boot time.  However,
Win-OS2 was no longer working from within OS/2.  If I wanted to run
Windows program from within OS/2, I would have to reinstall Windows 3.1
on a different drive.

**ASIDE:  Win95: DOS or No DOS?

Here's the real story about Win95 and DOS.  In regular DOS, the file
IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS are hidden files that start up the operating system,
first loading device drivers from CONFIG.SYS (if it exists), then loading
files from AUTOEXEC.BAT, and finally loading COMMAND.COM which is the
final portion of the DOS environment.  In Win95, these same files exist
(in earlier betas they were combined into a single WINBOOT.SYS file, but
this was changed back for compatibility reasons).  The new order of loading
is CONFIG.SYS (if exists), AUTOEXEC.BAT (if exists), COMMAND.COM, and
then WIN.COM, which starts up Win95.  If you put a PAUSE statement at
the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT, you can whack CONTROL-BREAK or CONTROL-C and
exit into COMMAND.COM at the DOS prompt.  Ver says DOS is 7.0, but for
all intents and purposes it is identical to DOS 6, except that all the
DOS files have been moved from C:\DOS to C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.  The ability
to do this is extremely useful for running picky DOS games.  You can
then get into Win95 by typing WIN at the DOS prompt.

Once you boot Win95, the system goes into 386 protected mode.  There
is no "exit Windows" command and no way to get back into DOS without
rebooting, however MS-DOS program windows can be set to an "exclusive"
mode which saves all running Windows apps into a temporary file, unloads
Windows, runs DOS, runs the program, and then when it finishes reloads
Windows from the image file.

So does Win95 need DOS or not? AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS are optional,
but then they were under plain DOS as well (in which case, DATE and
TIME were loaded before COMMAND.COM, remember?)  Win95 is clearly
running in 386-protected mode, but then so was Win3.11 and even Win3.1
in enhanced mode.  Does Win95 use DOS services?  Apparently very few;
some file info calls but the file access itself is entirely 32-bit
Windows code.  All the files in C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND are DOS programs,
but none of them are required.  In conclusion, Win95 does seem to
need DOS to be present, but does not rely on it when running.  I
am not sure if Win95 could be installed on a system without DOS
already being present.

2) Stability

OS/2 2.0 (for me) was not very stable.  2.1 was better, and 2.1+Service
Pack even better, but 3.0 is the most stable of the bunch.  Crashes due
to the tying up of the single-threaded message queue are rare but they
do occur, and although a dialogue box comes up after 30 seconds asking
if you want to terminate the program, in my experience this is
successful only 30% of the time.  Occasionally OS/2 will lock up when
running DOS game that is sending lots of sound to the Sound Blaster;
in 2.0 and 2.1 this was a system freeze almost all of the time, in
3.0 usually it just kills that one task and continues on, but very
rarely (once a week perhaps, running DOS games constantly) it will
lock up.  I used to get TRAP 000E errors with 2.0 and 2.1, (about
once a month) but have not had any with 3.0.  Once every thirty
boots or so the OS/2 desktop fails to load, pausing at the clock
icon, this requries a reboot (which is always successful).

Win95 beta 2 is remarkably stable for a beta.  It is only slightly
less stable than OS/2 Warp, a sobering fact.  While there is no
message queue problem, the serious flaw of resource limits still
exists, although it is much less of a problem than in Win 3.1.
Unlike Windows NT, where resource limits were lifted entirely,
they still exist in Win 95, and you can check on resources by
right-clicking the My Computer icon and clicking on Properties...
Resources seem to start at around 75% free after a boot and
go down by 2 or 3% with every program load, although when lots
of programs are loaded they decrease more slowly.  To experiment,
I tried to get them to go down to 0%.  This required loading:
Word for Windows NT 6.0 + a long document
WordPad
Windows Paint
Notepad
Media Player
MS-DOS prompt
WinPad (a PIM that comes with Windows 95)
HyperTerminal
Explorer, several levels of Help, about twenty open folder Windows
(with an average of 100 files in each), the Control Panel, several
Settings dialogs, the Find... program, and TaskBar settings.

There wasn't much else I could load; that was about everything I had
installed on that partition.  While I finally managed to get
resources down to 0%, the system did not crash, rather it would not
load any more windows on the screen and some tabbed dialogs lost one
or more tabs.  When I closed all the programs resources were back to
normal and Windows 95 operated as before.  Note that this is in 16-bit
color mode, I don't know if 256 color modes would be less or more
stressful on resources.  Still, I hope Microsoft increases or better
yet eliminates the resources problems in the release of Win95.

Also, Win95 would occasionally crash with a DOS game overflowing the
Sound Blaster (same as OS/2) and once in a while the desktop would
not fully load (again, eerily similar to OS/2) and occasionally the
video device driver would not load properly and streaks of little
dots would appear under the mouse cursor.  This is a common video
driver problem and will probably be corrected with the release.

Overall, system-stopping crashes in both Win95 and OS/2 Warp are so
rare that I have only experienced one of each in two weeks of daily,
constant use (including deliberate attempts to crash the system).
This is something that is totally unknown in the world of Windows 3.1
and Macintosh System 7, and is a welcome change.

3) Compatibility

To test compatibility I ran lots of DOS games and Windows 3.1 programs
under both systems.  Overall both are very compatible with legacy
applications.  These are some of the programs I tried:

Civilization with v3 patch (DOS)
- ran perfectly in both OS/2 and Win95

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (DOS)
- ran perfectly in both OS/2 and Win95, screen fades were faster in Win95,
  both operating systems would occasionally kill the program for an
  unknown reason (probably sound overflow, as mentioned before)

EA Sports NHL Hockey (DOS)
- ran in OS/2 without digitized sound, otherwise flawless.
- ran in Win95 with a garbled animated "video puck" intro,
  DID run with digitized sound but sounds were occasionally scratchy.
  Froze system once.

DOOM 1.1 (DOS)
- ran in OS/2 with digitized sound, slightly slower than DOS.
- would not run under Win95 (exited with a strange error)

DOOM 1.2 (DOS)
- runs in OS/2 but will not run with digitized sound
- have not tested under Win95 but some have claimed to have run it.

Magic Carpet Demo (DOS)
- would not run in either Win95 or OS/2, reasons unknown

System Shock (DOS)
- would not install in Win95 (General Protection Fault) but ran
  in both Win95 and OS/2

Wing Commander III (DOS)
- install rated CD-ROM as only single-speed in Win95
- ran under OS/2 but animation clips stuttered badly
- ran without stuttering perfectly under Win95, despite the install
  warning
- spaceflight ran perfectly on both systems
- mission loading times were greatly improved under Win95 (!!)

Under a Killing Moon (DOS)
- requires special install program to install under OS/2, however
  this did not work, nor would it run under OS/2.
- will not run under Win95, exits with message "exit Windows before
  running UAKM"

*NOTE that these tests were using MS-DOS command prompt windows running
full-screen.  The MS-DOS exclusive application mode was not tested,
as it is equivalent to just booting plain DOS (or hitting CONTROL-C
at the end of the AUTOEXEC.BAT) and games pretty much have to run
under that configuration.

Microsoft Publisher for Windows (Windows 3.1)
- ran fine under OS/2 but using lots of fonts produced regular
  General Protection faults
- ran fine under Win95 with fewer faults but a strange text
  highlighting bug documented in the README for Win95

MIDIsoft Music Studio for Windows (Windows 3.1)
- ran fine under OS/2 although when run in a window on the desktop
  occasionally the desktop would overwrite a portion of the window,
  this was easily fixed.
- ran flawlessly under Win95

Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows release 4 (Windows 3.1)
- ran fine under OS/2 but was slower than regular Windows
- ran flawlessly under Win95

Turtle Beach MIDI demo for the Maui card (Windows 3.1)
- ran flawlessly under OS/2
- would not run under Win95 (exited with strange error)
  (note that all other MIDI programs worked fine under Win95 using
   the Maui for MIDI output)

Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time CD-ROM (Windows 3.1)
- ran flawlessly under OS/2
- ran fine under Win95 although occasionally video sequences would
  get out of sync with audio, program had to be restarted to fix.

Overall I am surprised that Win95 does so well with DOS games. I
am less surprised that it does well with Windows programs.  Neither
seems to have an overwhelming advantage over the other when it comes
to compatibility with legacy applications.

4) Performance

Overall Windows 95 has a "snappier" feel than OS/2 Warp.  This can be
directly related to the video drivers.  The drivers for my Hercules
card in Win 95 make use of the accelerator (the W32i part) whereas
the OS/2 drivers do not.  This makes screen operations feel much
faster under Win95.

Here are some observational benchmarks:

Boot operating system:  Win 95 - 1:08   OS/2 Warp - 1:57
Open Drive C; folder    Win 95 - 0:02   OS/2 Warp - 0:04
Open "Control Panel"    Win 95 - 0:06   OS/2 Warp - 0:03
Open c:\windows folder  Win 95 - 0:03   OS/2 Warp - 0:06

Note that for most folder operations Win95 is faster, save for
opening the Control Panel (the OS/2 equivalent is opening the System
Setup folder)

In general I noticed less swapping in 8 megs under Win95 than
OS/2 Warp.  This is especially noticeable when running Windows
programs.  However Warp was not in any way "blown away" in terms of
speed, save for the non-accelerated video drivers which have a
heavy influence on perceived speed of the system.

When running Windows 3.1 programs Win95 is generally faster than
OS/2 Warp, although with the exception of Lotus 1-2-3 v 4 this is
not an overwhelming speed advantage.

As for multimedia performance, Windows 95 loaded .MID and .WAV
files much faster than OS/2, plus it was able to use my existing
Windows 3.1 Maui MIDI drivers.  The .AVI player included a 1 meg
animation of someone skiing, this was just as fast if not faster
and smoother than the equivalent OS/2 animation player, plus it
covered a larger area of the screen.  Both OS/2 and Win95 animation
players stomp all over Windows 3.1's "flickering postage stamp"
standard.

5) Customization

This is one area where Windows 95 does not do very well.  The default
icons on the desktop of "My Computer" and (if you have a network)
"Network Neighborhood" cannot be changed in name or appearance.  Nor can
any of the control items such as the shredder.  In OS/2, every icon and
every name can be changed to suit one's preference.  I hope that this
changes in the release of Win95.

Screen color schemes and fonts can be changed under the Display Properties
tabbed dialog, similar to the Scheme Pallete under OS/2.  However, there
are no drag and drop fonts and colors as in OS/2.  The default color
schemes are quite nice in Win95, however, especially "Blues 256" which
gives an almost-workstation like feel to the desktop.  One peculiar bug
is that if you change the title bar and menu font sizes in Win95 from
the defaults you will experience ugly icon resizing on the next boot.

While OS/2 has the LaunchPad to start applications, Win95 has the Start
button on the Task Bar (the task bar is very useful for switching
applications and I use a shareware equivalent for OS/2)  The Start
button can be customized quite easily but not as easily as dragging
and dropping icons to OS/2's LaunchPad.  When Win95 installs it
automatically puts all your program groups into sub-menus on the Start
button.  One handy feature of the Start button (and indeed, all menus
in Windows 95) is that you don't need to hold the button down or
click again to enter a sub-menu.  One click gets you into "menu
navigation" mode where all menus are accessible just by sweeping the
mouse.  This is a nice touch that actually saves a lot of time. In
addition, the selection being swept over is always highlighted, so
it is much easier to "hit" the right menu selection in Win95.

Both operating systems allow you to make "shadows" (or in Win95
logo: Shortcuts) which are basically pointers to programs and
documents that you can put anywhere you like.  OS/2 keeps tight
rein on its shadows; Win95 shortcuts are much more easily lost
and the system has to search for them if the name of the shortcut
changes or is moved.

Overall OS/2 is much easier to make "yours" than Win95.  While
undoubtedly intended to make Win95 easier for network admins to
give technical support, such inflexibility makes Win95 much more
impersonal than OS/2 on a single-user system.

6) Native Applications

There are not many native Win95 or OS/2 applications that exist, but
for obvious reasons there are more of the latter.  For my tests I
chose to compare Wordprocessing and Communications, two of the most
popular uses of computers for desktop users.

For Wordprocessing I chose DeScribe 4.0 on the OS/2 side (I have not
upgraded to 5.0 because of the expiry date on the program which must
be registered to remove) and Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows NT on the
Windows 95 side.

Here are some informal benchmarks for wordprocessing:

Loading program:   DeScribe 0:34  Winword 0:22
Scroll document:   DeScribe 1:30  Winword 0:24
Save document:     DeScribe 0:12  Winword 0:08

Here we see that Word for Windows 6.0, despite being a much larger
and full-featured (some would say bloated) program than DeScribe,
still manages to load, scroll and save faster than DeScribe.  Due
to the accelerated video drivers such operations such as scrolling
are much snappier and feel faster than they actually are.  Note that
the document in question was about 30 pages long and scrolling tests
were using the cursor keys, not page up/down (that's why they took
so long on both systems)

Unfortunately for OS/2, there is little to recommend for DeScribe
over Winword 6 in terms of features.  It is more customizable (for
example, you can edit and change all the smart icons on the toolbar,
in Winword 6 you can only change their order) and has a few other
neat features like a fast zoom and unlimited undo.  However, Word
6 has AutoCorrect (far more useful and unobtrusive than I could
ever guess) and better document formatting tools, plus an
equation editor and loads of other goodies.  It would be an
advantage for DeScribe if it ran faster than Winword 6 for NT on
the same system, but in fact the reverse is true.  As a writer,
I find Winword 6 to be faster and more pleasant to use than
DeScribe, and since Winword 6 for Windows NT utilizes long
filenames, I have transferred all my wordprocessing chores over
to the Windows 95 side.

As for communications, the only Win95 native application I could
test was the HyperTerminal program that came with Windows 95.  It
could not connect at higher than 19.2k without dropping characters
and terminal emulations were not fully functional.  For OS/2 I
use a character-mode application, LiveWire 2.2, which connects
happily at 57.6k and does not drop characters, and the terminal
emulations are much closer to the real thing (but still not perfect;
I have yet to find a terminal program, and I have tested hundreds,
that produces error-free terminal emulation all the time)

*NOTE: My system is somewhat peculiar in that it used to have
a mouse on COM1: and a modem on COM2:, the two external serial
ports on the back of my machine.  I had a 16550AFN installed
on COM2: and that made background communications much more
error-free under OS/2.  However, when I installed my new video
card, I noticed immediately that communications were garbled
and would not work properly.  I tried every combination but
only switching my mouse and modem worked, and then I lost
the use of my 16550.  Nobody has ever been able to explain why
this happened, but it makes multitasking communications
difficult.

As for dialup Internet access, I have no idea how to make this
work in Win95.  When I click on my "Dialup networking" folder
nothing happens.  I have no idea how to obtain or install
SLIP/IP software for Windows 95, nor do the help files explain
how to do so.  There is a built-in stripped down version of
Microsoft Mail, but it appears to only want to work over a
LAN.  In contrast, OS/2 SLIP took only a single "INSTALL"
command on the Bonus Pack disks to set up, and came with
all the tools (and the ability to seek out and install new
updates automatically) including a newsreader and a superior
Mosaic clone.  For this reason I do all my serious netsurfing
using OS/2, saving Windows 95 for the occasional text-mode
Usenet reading with HyperTerminal.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

Astute Usenet readers will remember me as the "OS/2ibo",
an irreverent if slightly fanatical OS/2 advocate and Microsoft
critic.  However, as I get older and less zealous, I begin to see
both sides of the current Microsoft/IBM and Windows/OS/2 debates.
Both operating systems have advantages and disadvantages, but
I am impressed enough with the beta of Windows 95 to keep it
on my system along with OS/2.  It is more stable than I had
predicted and uses fewer system resources.  The other Microsoft
program that has impressed me is Word for Windows NT 6.0.  It
is clearly faster and much more stable than its 16-bit cousin,
plus it utilizes long filenames, a crucial point for me.

I think the existence of OS/2 has had much to do with Microsoft's
efforts towards Windows 95, and I hope to see IBM improve OS/2
even more following the release of Win95 late this year. (one
assumes it will be late this year, but one never knows with
these things)  Both OS/2 and Windows 95 put serious pressure
on Apple to improve its Macintosh operating system, which should
be welcomed by Macintosh users.  Clearly, competition in the
operating system market is good for the consumer, who ends
up with more choices and more companies trying harder to make
his/her life easier.

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