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- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!yorkohm!minster!martin
- From: martin@minster.york.ac.uk
- Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32
- Subject: using NT - lots of questions!
- Message-ID: <712014546.16365@minster.york.ac.uk>
- Date: 24 Jul 92 21:49:07 GMT
- Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England
- Lines: 79
-
- Hello everybody!
- I'm surprised how little discussion there has been about the NT pre-release
- so far - maybe everyone is just using it!
-
- Anyway I have some questions, and comments: :-)
-
- Is there any documentation on regedit? I'm afraid I can't work it out! I can
- just about understand what I see there, but not a clue what might be sensible
- edits to make to it! (and what edits will kill everything! :-)
-
- How do I add/remove/review device drivers? I found an entry in the user porfile
- editor for `can add and remove device drivers' but if I enable this for my
- user profile (or admin) I get:
-
- LAN Manager error 3221225485 occured
-
- and nothing changes (BTW, can LAN Manager *really* fail in over 3 billion ways?
- Please tell me this is an address! :-)
- I have a feeling that If I can get this to work, it will unlock lots of other
- things! Could it be failing because there isn't a driver for my ethernet card
- (can I vote for an NE1000/2000 driver? I'm sure lots of people have them!) and
- so I didn't install the network stuff - much as I'd *love* to have TCP/IP.
-
- I have a SoundBlaster Pro compatible card - a pro audio spectrum 16, and would
- like to see if it will work - as a SBpro.
-
- I keep on running out of memory, when I have more than a couple of programs
- running - in particular I've noticed file manager taking several megabytes(?)
- when it reads the index of very large directories - eg \i386\winnt on the
- distribution CDROM. Now I've got a 20Mbyte swap file, and 13Mbytes free on
- that device for it to grow (and I have seen it grow and shrink alittle), but
- my compilations, etc still fail, running out of far heap, or just failing to
- run. Is this normal?
-
- When the document said the swap file must be at least 20Mbytes I thought that
- must be to give room for lots of things to run, but just booting seems to
- take most of it! Now I realize that the `real' release is supposed to need
- less memory (I didn't think I'd see my 16Mbyte machine paging madly!), I hope
- it is 'substantially' less!
-
- winword is terribly slow, also how do I add things to the OLE registry?
- Also I've had patchy success running normal DOS programs from the command line,
- they sometimes run, but then when they exit, hang. But when I just tried it
- again it seemed to work fine, although I saw the start-up of dosx, which I
- don't remember seeing before!
-
- (Is information like this in the printed docs? Apart from the API docs, there
- seems to be an absence of on-line documentation about the system - am I missing
- something obvious? There are alot of places to hide on a CDROM :-)
- There is, of course, lots of compiler-related documentation)
-
- I also can't get multi-boot to work - it boots NT fine, but if I try to boot
- the underlying system (DOS 5), it gives the "this is not a system disk, or
- disk read error message, hit any key to re-boot' message. I don't really care
- because I've got a DOS 5 boot disk that re-directs everything to C:, but
- it isn't right.
-
- On a more positive note:
-
- Apart from the speed of 16-bits windows, this release is incredibly impressive!
- The installation was a wheeze - helped by the fact that I'm lucky, and have a
- supported CDROM, on a supported SCSI interface (they came together!)
-
- Although the installation guide is abit coy when it says that is won't work
- with OS/2 v2.0's boot manager - what they really mean is that the install
- program *will hang* if boot manager is present!
-
- I can't wait to see the September release!
-
- Martin
- INTERNET: martin@minster.york.ac.uk
- JANET: martin@uk.ac.york.minster
- surface:
- Dr. Martin C. Atkins
- Dept. of Computer Science
- University of York
- Heslington
- York YO1 5DD
- ENGLAND
-