F>                                                         [...] i have
 F> lately been getting up on the os/2 info web pages  and it sounds like
 F> everyone in the world should be running Warp.  Even the  more
 F> 'conservative' or objective pages seem to lean towards os/2 over
 F> win3.11 or win95.  
That's interesting.  I do wish someone would clue the magazines in.  (-:
 F> My question is has anyone done any comparisons
 F> between win3.11 and  win95 and os/2 on their own machines?  
Comparisons of what ?  
Speed ?  In general, a well-configured OS/2 system that takes advantage of 
things like HPFS can often outperform a plain DOS system for running DOS 
applications -- especially so for running more than one of them at the same 
time.  (-:  Stability ?  No system is crashproof, but OS/2 can at least 
recover a lot more gracefully from many things than DOS or DOS+Windows can.  
The automatic checking of HPFS partitions after a dirty shutdown is an 
example.  Compatibility ?  If you've spent ages tweaking your DOS+Windows 
3.1x system so that the DOS boxes under Windows have a reasonable amount of 
free memory, or fiddling with CONFIG.SYS because only by rebooting can you 
get the multiple configurations of environment variables and TSRs necessary 
to run your DOS programs, then the multiple Virtual DOS Machines of OS/2, 
each of which can have its own configuration entirely separate from all 
others, will seem like a godsend.
 F> I understand that os/2 can be more  difficult to setup but in my
 F> experience, anything worth running usually is.  
More difficult than what ?  Yes, it is more difficult than switching on a 
machine that has a pre-installed DOS or DOS+Windows 95.  But in my experience 
it is actually _less_ difficult to install OS/2 Warp from scratch than it is 
to install many other operating systems from scratch.
 F> I  have read all the technical specs and such and i'm seriously 
 F> looking into  switching to Warp 3.0.  
My suggestion is that you consider OS/2 Warp version 4.0 rather than version 
3.0.  There's only one major caveat for someone such as yourself who is 
running a lot of DOS BBS software :  If you have DOS applications that use 
the old, DOS 1.x and CP/M style, FCB file deletion calls (such as some 
versions of FrontDoor) then you will need to download FixPack 1 for OS/2 Warp 
4.0 from IBM's support site on the World Wide Web.
Since you claim to be an avid command-line user, I'll also recommend that you 
look at JP Software's 4OS2 version 3.00 and Take Command version 2.00 for 
OS/2.  The former is a replacement command interpreter, which can be 
substituted for CMD, the text-mode command interpreter supplied with OS/2.  
The latter is a PM command interpreter.  Both support a lot of extensions to 
the functionality of the standard command interpreter, including some very 
powerful extensions to the batch language (and they both support REXX as 
well, of course), and many interactive enhancements (such as a batch file 
debugger, filename completion, and scrollable command line and directory 
histories).  For more information, ask in the FIDONET 4DOS echo (which covers 
4DOS, 4OS2, and the various Take Commands).
 ¯ JdeBP ®
--- FleetStreet 1.19 NR
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