(Excerpts from a message dated 11-15-99, Jack Stein to Albert Sodyl)

Hi Jack--

JS>Not certain what you are running, but I ran OS/2 2.1 for a couple of
  >years on a 486/33 with 8 megs.  It ran great, never crashed on me. 
  >I switched to WARP 3 ONLY because IBM gave me a free copy, and it
  >has TCP/IP so works great with the internet.  WARP 3 ran great on 8
  >megs also.  Still run it on the same machine, but now have 20 megs
  >ram, still runs great.  I have WARP 3 BLUE, WARP 3 CONNECT and WIN95
  >installed on this machine.  I never use WARP connect, and am thinking
  >of installing WARP 4 on that partition, but, most people seem to
  >think WARP 4 would be a bit of a pig on this vintage machine.  They
  >also said that about WARP 3, but were wrong about that.  My 486 with
  >WARP 3 blue is faster for many things than my P133 at work with WIN95
  >on it, and works a hell of a lot better.

    For what it is worth, my wife is running Warp 4 FixPak 5 on my old
PS/VP 433DX (32 MB RAM) with no complaints.  Of course, she runs only
text-mode programs, most of them written for DOS and running under a
VDM.  I notice the difference when I am running some OS/2 diagnostics
with her machine, as compared to running them on my vintage-1997
ThinkPad 365XD (P120 when plugged into the wall - P60 when on battery).
But she thinks her "new machine" is great when compared to running many
of the same programs on to her previous 16 MHz, PS/2 model 80 under
IBM-DOS 5 revision 1.  Guess it depends on what you are used to :-).

    According to the books, it takes more (minimum) RAM to run Warp 4
than it did to run Warp 3 (but 20 MB should be more than sufficient) and
at least a 80486 chip (which you have), and somewhat larger boot drive
(I have 205 MB, but the network stuff that I use is in another
partition).  There are also some add-ons that came with Warp 4 (such as
voice recognition--one of the many options I never bothered to install)
that require a more-powerful CPU chip than either you or I have.  But I
can't see why Warp 4 would run any slower than Warp 3 on your machine if
you stick to the same class of applications.  I replaced the
preinstalled Win95 with Warp 4 (instead of with Warp 3) on my ThinkPad
only because: 1) I had a DevCon freebie, and 2) there was more device
support right off of the CD-ROM for some of the ThinkPad goodies.  Now
that I have been running Warp 4 for a couple of years, I wouldn't go
back (because I am used to it!).  For troubleshooting convenience, and
because I had a second Warp 4 CD-ROM, I replaced Warp 3 with Warp 4 in
my wife's "new" machine when I reconfigured it for her set of
applications.  But if you are happy with what you have, why switch?

    Regards,

        --Murray

___
 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * If it can happen, it will (Murphy)

--- Maximus/2 2.02