Labels:text | screenshot | red | font OCR: A Common Man's Experience with OS/2 Warp. By Ben Zell (ben.zell@sucbbs.com) At first I wanted a good 32-bit operating system that would relieve me of the resource problems and multitasking limitations of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I went over my local computer store and picked up OS/2 Warp for $70 to CD-ROM hoping this would solve all of my problens. on The process : PROBLEM #1: Compressed Drive Incompatibility I looked at the installation manual and noticed that it said that OS/2 Warp would not install on any compressed drive (besides special OS/2 compression utilities). DriveSpace, which comes with MS-DOS 6.22, so that I am using means I have to uncompress my hard drive, requiring me to delete some important things to free up space (Like Doom !! ). Well, after all that, I installed OS/2 and no installation problems occurred. na jor PROBLEM #2: Unsupported Printer I am finally in OS/2 and am configuring it to my hardware when I notice that it doesn't support my printer- nor does it support Windows drivers, so I would probably have to call the printer manufacturer's BBS (long distance) and download one ... what a pain the ass! PROBLEM #3-5: Windows Programs in General Okay, now that all the installation is over, I'm ready to try a Windows program (due to lack of OS/2 programs). go into the Win-OS/2 folder and double click Edit Master, my text editor of choice. Errort Errort Errort I though OS/2 was supposed to run Windows programs seamlessly ?!? that program is made in Visual Basic, so I decided to try my Well, communications program (Procomm Plus for Windows). PROBLEM #4: Well, Moden Trouble this problem adds a little to the previous title bar and min/max buttons are unusually large and out-of- glitches but here goes ... Well immediately I spot a few graphic one that weren't there before, and the size of the proportion compared to the rest of the window. So, I try to dial a BBS assuming at least that would work, 9600. What's the deal here ?!? I have a V.34 28800 baud CONNECT noden! I want my moneys worth and I want to be able to connect blous. at 28800 (or one of the fallbacks). Well, that PROBLEM #5: Sound Shut Off I have to admit that OS/2's 16-bit system sounds impressed me on my Sound Blaster 16, but when I'm running any Windows program, it's as if my Sound Blaster were off, no sound in Windows, no sound in OS/2 -- strange. PROBLEM #6: HyperACCESS (Bonus Pak) A terrible overlooked bug! How can you spell Pak without the "c'? Mah, just kidding ... but after noden trouble I though that maybe I could use all this the noden (HyperACCESS). It doesn't install - end of story. program that comes in the bonus pak from on won't accept the CD-ROM as the source installation drive! It just PROBLEM #7: Unbearable Slowness This is definitely one of the more important problems. With 05/2 my harddrive is almost constantly loading: almost feel bad for it! It never loaded Windows, probably because of my 2-meg Smartdry cache, but lo like this in and behold, there is no OS/2 equivalent of Smartdru, causing things to become incredibly slow. One feature that really of sound, then loads for a half second, then repeats until bit takes a beating is multimedia. I have a 10 second long 16- 44.1khz stereo WAV file that plays a tenth of a second the file is over. It's almost hard to tell what it is that's playing. (multimedia video). The same thing happens with AVI files PROBLEM #8: DOS is More Completet addition to DriveSpace, I miss Scandisk, Defrag, Smartdry, Edit, and other utilities IBM failed to include, In they just throw in the bare basics. PROBLEM #9: Incompatible with a lot of TSR's from I used to use Mcafee's Vshield TSR to protect myself viruses, but screw that: it's only useful if I'm gonna stay inside the DOS window I loaded it from ... forever. Obviously similar ISR's won't work with everything either. PROBLEM #10: Inconsistency between standards All of my beautiful fonts, not compatible with 05/2 programs. OLE isn't either! Neither is DDE! can have Windows, OS/2 and Windows on the same screen, Great, but too bad they can't take advantage of eachother's features. PROBLEM #11: Colorado Jumbo 250 it's I paid a couple hundred dollars for my tape drive and not supported by OS/2! That's pretty much all I can saut PROBLEM #12: Uninstallation I'm sick of this crap! Now how do I get rid of IBM doesn't include an uninstall program with it's OS it? Microsoft does, so I have to format my hard drive and use as boot disk to reload everything onto my hard drive from tape. This is not exactly the "user friendly" way. Well, to conclude these are problems that occurred in 2 days of use, there has to be more problems, since I still never got around to trying everything. I never used much of the Bonus Pak and I never got to try any games with it (I had to delete them to fit OS/2). Well basically OS/2 Warp is not a good buy and is not the future of computing. Undoubtedly Microsoft's Windows 95 will not have most of the problems listed here, and I think that they will have a new system. better chance ... I can't say though since I haven't seen the But anyways ... please distribute this file everywhere possible and try to keep it in its original archive if you can. Thanks a lot. -Ben Zell (ben. zell@sucbbs.com)
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