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OS/2 Shareware BBS: 36 Tips
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1995-03-31
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5KB
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94 lines
Adventures of a numpty with OS/2
________________________________
Having bought Warp CD (what installation problems?) I thought it might
be useful to document my experiences so far, for other numpty's who may
be struggling with the beast. The following are the salient points, no
warranty etc. but hopefully they'll be useful to someone.
My system is a Vanilla 486/2 50 with local bus graphics & IDE, 8Mb RAM
and the usual bits & pieces.
I had a spare 160Mb partition on the hard spinny thing and decided to
use this for OS/2, no installation problems at all, even with CD drives
et al, installed boot manager and let it rip. It ran, but Oh So Slooow.
I'd love to see it on the specified 386sx with 4MB memory!
A second install was necessary as OS/2 decided to be even more unstable
than Windows, I reformatted the partition to use FAT instead of HPFS
and things are OK now, I've come to the conclusion that HPFS should be
left well alone until the 16Mb upgrade is funded (don't tell the wife!)
Running FAT things are very stable apart from some occasional messages
complaining about the SBAUD$ driver, which coincide neatly with the
beast running out of memory. Overall, well pleased.
Another instability problem was cured by moving the swap drive to its
own 38Mb partition on disk, because swapper.dat is dynamic, when I was
running multiple tasks all doing I/O to the same drive as swapper, I'm
pretty sure OS/2 got its underwear twisted as things went ape. Isolating
the file seems to cure the problem, although I'm finding my system is
using buckets of virtual memory - the recommended 10Mb space wouldn't
last long.
All my DOS/Windows apps will run under OS/2 and are stable, except some
games (but who'd want to run them under OS/2 anyway?). I particularly
like the addition of ADOBE fonts as I've found some belters on the
IBM BBS at Warwick. Details enclosed when you register, there are plenty
of WAV's, fonts and stuff and also obscure drivers. The modem there will
answer at 14,400 so its pretty quick downloading.
On said database I recently found a maintenance release (005) which is
worth the 100 minute dowload - it didn't appear to cure any specific
problem of mine according to the documentation, but things are a bit
quicker with the fix installed. Speaking of the documentation, the five
filenames given in the LOADDSKF instructions are wrong, just substitute
the filenames you have downloaded. In the same instructions it tells you
where to find LOADDSKF on the database, but it ain't there. It is,
however, on your OS/2 CD so just copy it onto the hard disk & all will
be well.
Another goody found on the BBS is workplace shell for windows, March
Beta release. I have installed it today (30/3), and although I've only
had it a few hours it seems quite stable. It also gives the OS/2 look
and feel to program manager, I need PM to run some things but have
put the WPS into my OS/2 startup folder and once loaded switching between
OS/2 and Windows is quicker, I've a feeling WPS takes less memory &
processing power than the original Gates PM.
Enclosed in this ZIP is an OS/2 BMP called XWING. When running the
Workplace shell from OS/2, I ran file manager and just for a laugh
double-clicked XWING.EXE. OS/2 switched me back to the desktop and
proceeded to run XWING in a tiny window as shown in the BMP. It runs,
no sound and very slow, but it runs. Can't explain this, if I run
XWING from OS/2 I get a BIG window. ?????. It does the same for tetris
as well.
If you are, like me, memory constrained program manager(or WPS) is the
way to run memory-hungry Windows programs - I think they use a Windows
swapfile rather than swapper.dat and this seems to help. Graphics
programs are the main culprits here on my system.
My graphics adaptor (CL5428) runs faster at the higher 640x480
resolutions than the lower ones, don't know why but it does this under
Windows as well. If you're running one, wind up the resolution and you
should see a speed increase.
Extra CODECS for MMPM/2 available on the boards (ANPOMSVC etc) are good,
OS/2 will run AVI files which windows can't with these installed, it
also runs the pictures and sound in sync which VFW doesn't on some of
the files I have downloaded from Compu$erve.
Be very careful with downloaded OS/2 2.x software, some (not all) does
not run happily under Warp and it can crash your system. Try and stick
to Warp re-releases or very recent (late '94) files. If a crash occurs
it's usually not fatal, a reboot will normally sort it out.
That's about all, if any other numpty's out there have any similar
observations then please post them up, I'd rather download other
people's experiences than listen to the engaged tone on the support
line. For experienced users, sorry if you have downloaded this and
most likely found it all old hat - but everyone has to start somewhere.
Compu$erve 100127,3041