Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor
Keywords: NT
Originator: kcurtis@inthehat.engin.umich.edu
Nntp-Posting-Host: inthehat.engin.umich.edu
Lines: 22
I recently installed the July NT release:
Its quite stable. I only crashed it a couple of times, and that had to do with not properly configuring my printer driver. The rest of the time, it just locks up, and you think its crashed, but it eventually starts working again.
There is a lot of it missing:
No FAT,HPFS->NTFS in-situ file system upgrader
No settings for DOS sessions
No POSIX support
Not many hardware drivers, and I found some to be buggy
Little on-line help
Not all the security features are implemented
Not all the accessories included (write, etc)
Etc, Etc.
There is a lot of code, there, though, but the DOS-16 and the Win-16 code is buggy. Some of the code is just a port from the Win3, and not Win3.1
All of the code, though is either not tuned or just very slow because of NT's overhead. NT takes my 486-50 with 16 megs and turns it into an 8086. It is not at all usable in a work environment, if you are planning on using any DOS or Win-16 apps. I'm merely using it to test some things, and to attempt to port my stuff to 32-bit. It better be massively sped up in the next few months, or it won't fly.
I'm not an expert on making operating systems, but my experience with Microsoft is that they have a ton to do and they won't be able to do it in time. I cannot believe that they expect it to ship at the end of December. I was a tester for Windows 3.1, and it was very stable and seemed ready to ship from the beginning (last June), yet it shipped 10 months later. I cannot understand how NT which is only half here could be predicted to ship in 5 months.
