Seems that Merlin has inherited all of the disasterous problems of Warp 3 in
MPTS. Within one hour of installing Warp 4, my network configuration no
longer works properly.

I initially installed TCP/IP + OS/2 NetBIOS. Of course, the NE2000 driver
supplied with Warp 4 is the same one as Warp 3, which doesn't work on 99.9%
of NE2000s ever made (none of which have a shared RAM address). Out with
the NatSemi one, as usually.

Later, I added NetBIOS over TCP/IP, because I want to talk to my Samba
server. It added okay, although it didn't work; OS/2 would not see the
server. I then added the Netware support protocol (presumably IPX). This
turned out to be the bad move of the decade; MPTS gave an error updating
CONFIG.SYS (as it is prone to doing). From then on, OS/2 during boot says
it could not load the file NETWKSTA.200 in F:\IBMLAN\NETPROG, although it
exists (I checked). I'm also told that the Network Message stuff is already
started during boot, although it isn't. I expect that to repair this
problem I will have to remove MPTS and TCP/IP and reinstall both.

I'm fairly unimpressed with the user interface, too. The menus look fairly
poor. The hardware manager is next to useless; as far as I can tell, it
does not let you change any settings, so what's the good of it? I installed
it with the wrong settings for my PAS16 initially; the only way to fix them
was to go back into Selective Install (same as with Warp 3).

The speed isn't anything to write home about. I have a Cyrix 6x86-P166+, 32mb
RAM. Windows95 is a lot snappier on the same hardware, and does not sit
around thrashing the disk all day as Warp4 does. Win95 boots much faster
too, and the networking works with Samba absolutely flawlessly. Finally, I
have to admit that I prefer the Win95 interface to Warp4's; if anything,
Win95's is more consistent. I am certainly *not* a big fan of Windows95; I
don't like Microsoft, and in fact prefer to work in Linux (either text or
under X) wherever possible.

I haven't played with the VoiceType stuff, for lack of a suitable
microphone. Unfortunately, I do a lot of development work in Delphi32
(2.0), which Warp4 won't run anyway. I also use Linux a lot. Without
suitable applications to run in Warp, VoiceType isn't enough to keep me
using it.

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

In conclusion, apart from VoiceType and a rearrangement of the desktop (a
slight improvement on Warp3, but not to Win95's level), I see little
enhancement to Warp4 from Warp3, and just like Warp3, no incentive for me
to actually use it. Disappointing, because Warp4 Upgrade cost me over
double the Windows95 upgrade. And WinNT Workstation Academic was the same
price ...


Regards,
Hamish

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