Hello Chris!

Friday January 03 1997 14:29, Chris Halliday wrote to Hamish Moffatt:

 HM>> I'm fairly unimpressed with the user interface, too. The menus look
 HM>> fairly poor.
 > I'm puzzled. Which menus?

At the top of the screen, WarpCenter or whatever it's called. The far left
button just lists your desktop contents, for example; the rest is just a
toolbar of other system things. Nothing very revolutionary in that. The
desktop contents thing is available as a free powertoy from Microsoft; the
rest of the Win95 taskbar is, imho, far more powerful than WarpCenter.

 HM>> The hardware manager is next to useless; as far as I can
 HM>> tell, it does not let you change any settings, so what's the good of
 HM>> it?

 > It's like MSD: a diagnostic tool, not an installation utility.

Ie completely useless, then?

 HM>> I installed it with the wrong settings for my PAS16 initially; the
 HM>> only way to fix them was to go back into Selective Install (same as
 HM>> with Warp 3).

 > Huh? You're a glutton for punishment, that's fer sure! Editing
 > CONFIG.SYS takes seconds.

Shouldn't have to edit configuration files by hand. Why include the GUI,
otherwise?

 HM>> The speed isn't anything to write home about. I have a Cyrix
 HM>> 6x86-P166+, 32mb RAM. Windows95 is a lot snappier on the same hardware,
 HM>> and does not sit around thrashing the disk all day as Warp4 does.

 > Did you leave the swapfile at the default size? Tuned the memory
 > settings etc for the various envoronments?

Shouldn't have to change millions of settings to get acceptable performance.
What's wrong with some sort of autotuning, or better sensible defaults?

*I* have no problem with these sorts of optimisations. But the typical
non-technical end user will not know how or to make these adjustments, and
shouldn't have to. There are very few optimisations available in Win95 that
will make any difference to system speed; the defaults work pretty well.

 HM>> No fewer than four system boots during the installation, too. Once from
 HM>> boot floppies, run FDISK; again from boot floppies. Then two reboots
 HM>> during the installation itself.

 > Why is this such a Bad Thing?

Unnecessary. Win95 takes two reboots, Linux one. Also, no operating system
should *require* a reboot after repartitioning; at that stage of the
installation, nothing critical is running anyway. Linux demonstrates this.


Regards,
Hamish

--- GoldED/P32 2.42.G1219+