Jeff, at 17:45 on Tue, Feb 21 1995, you wrote to Bill Grimsley ...

JG>> Hmmm, I'll think about that. I would like to get rid of all 
JG>> my WinApps and am taking steps in that direction with the FD
JG>> catalogue program. The Encyclopaedia is a little different 
JG>> though :-(

BG> My MS Bookshelf runs just fine from Win31 under Warp, SB 
BG> support included, so I can't foresee any major problems.

JG> I just want to get rid of Windows. It'll save me some disk space 
JG> which is getting a little short around here at the moment.

Sure, I understand what you mean, but don't forget that quite a few 'ROMs
are specifically set up to run under Windows only (most of the
encyclopaedias and other reference works, for example), therefore you'll
probably need to maintain some minimal form of Windows support.

AAMOI, I have just grabbed a couple of files, WINWARP3.ZIP, which details
how to install Win-OS/2 support from 2.1 under Warp, and WSETUP13.ZIP,
which allows installation of native Win31 from Warp, and on an HPFS
partition.  Haven't tried either yet, but should get around to it in the
next couple of days.  I rather like the thought of using 2.1's 32-bit
Win-OS/2 code under Warp too.

JG> I'm thinking of buying a large SCSI HD soon. I've already got two 
JG> IDE HDs hanging off IDE controller 1 and I have a HardCard setup as 
JG> the second IDE controller. My HD controller also has SCSI on it 
JG> too, so with any luck I wont need to use another slot.

I'm not convinced that SCSI devices are really necessary these days, as
EIDE drives are just as quick, and a lot cheaper.  You could always piss
the controller off, buy a 4-port VLB EIDE controller (as I just did), and
run up to 4 (E)IDE drives from the one internal slot.

JG>> What sort of video card are you using?

BG> Cirrus Logic 5428.  When I installed Warp though, it auto-detected 
BG> the Cirrus, and installed native support for up to 16 million 
BG> colours at 640x480, but I'm running it at 800x600x64k.

JG> It's the drivers for that one that are supposed to be of the buggy 
JG> lot. It's been recommended that people use the 5426 or 5424 (??) 
JG> drivers instead if you are experiencing any problems.

Really?  I thought the ET-4000 W32i drivers were the buggy ones.  I've
certainly seen nothing to suggest that the Cirrus drivers are causing
problems, and I'm running the 5428 chipset drivers too.  So far, they've
been nothing less than superb.

BG> At no time did I notice any problems with swapfile space not being 
BG> deallocated, although by the same token, I started with a 16Mb 
BG> swapper anyway, so who'd know?

JG> Most of the problems seem to occur with PM apps from what 
JG> I've read. How many PM apps do you run?

About half of my normal task mix, maybe a bit less.

JG>> 32 apps? Let me see, you have 16MB of memory right? Hmmm, my 
JG>> 12MB should be quite sufficient then. Good.

BG> Yep, and most of those apps were multiple copies of PMJpeg, 
BG> Galleria etc., with huge bitmaps loaded, as well as two separate 
BG> Windows sessions.  I really wanted to punish the RAM, as you can 
BG> tell.  Ergo, 12Mb should work brilliantly with Warp.

JG> Very good! :-)  <---big cheesy grin.

Russell would suggest that you could get by quite happily with only 4Mb,
but if you did, that cheesy grin would become a hateful scowl.

BG> If you do buy the blue-box, make sure it's the CD-ROM version, as 
BG> installation time is more than halved, and I don't really trust 
BG> floppies to maintain their data integrity in the long term, 
BG> either.

JG> Yep, that's precisely what I intend to do. I've installed some 
JG> things from CDs lately and the ease of the install is unbelievable.

I don't even care if it takes just as long either.  The biggest relief is
not having to sit in front of the PC while waiting for it to ask for Disk
13 of 28, and when you bung it in the drive, it comes up with a "drive
not ready" message or similar.  I really hate floppies!

JG> Installing the Watcom compiler was a breeze (actually to get that 
JG> on 3.5, you need to buy the CD version and send away special for 
JG> it).

Wot, no disk images?  That's positively mediaeval!

Regards, Bill

--- Msgedsq/2 2.2e