I am in the process of purchasing the new Gateway 2000 DX2-66 with 8 mb ram, 64k cache, 2 340 mb "local bus" IDE disks and the new VESA local bus ATI ultra pro. Gateway estimates that it will ship about Oct 10.
Meanwhile, I crashed my Model 70 (QEMM and SuperStor don't seem to be compatible)
and so I decided to put OS/2 on my hard disk and play with it before my new system
arrive so I will have some idea as to what to install when it arrives. With 4mb
of ram it is s-l-o-w. WordPerfect for Windows is unusable, and Excel is almost
unusable. Most DOS stuff seems to run at about the same speed. It's easy to see where Microsoft gets their advertisements.
Anyhow, I am in need of some simple advice. Since my system is so slow I have not
tried everything.
1) Should I wait until 3.1 support comes out to install OS/2 to keep consistency with
my windows apps?
2) What about HPFS on one or both disks? It appears to a friend of mine to offer
no real advantage unless you are using very large files. On the other hand
the only advantages to FAT are 1) the utilities that I have, which
supposedly are either not needed or available bundled with OS/2, and 2) the
compatibility with DOS products that don't run under OS/2.
3) Are any of the productivity tools any good? All I've tried is the spreadsheet and
the one that prints a graph of system performance. What should I test out
within the next two weeks.
4) I will need tape backup and Gateway sells Archive which is not OS/2 compatible.
What do you suggest?
5) What other suggestions do you have for me ?
Thanks for the advice. I can hardly wait to get up and running.
Dick Sidbury E-Mail: sidbury@jaguar.uofs.edu
Department of Computing Sciences sidbury@peculier.cs.uofs.edu