Not dead yet...

[David Gaskill]

On Thu, 26 Aug 1999 15:36:50 GMT, Anders Gjerl v wrote:

>> Until about 18 months ago I had used nothing but OS/2 but commercial
>> pressures forced me to migrate to NT; undoubtedly it lacks some of th=
e
>> elegance of OS/2 but it is at least as robust and above all has a 
>wealth of
>> applications available. I would be genuinely interested to learn, ( 
>leaving on
>> one side the lack of applications), what benefits I could expect if I=
 
>were to
>> switch to another operating system .
>Agreed - NT is relatively robust (as is OS/2). My primary reason for 
>not wanting NT anywhere near my pc's (if I can avoid it ;) is that I 
>don't like the fact that it's sooooooo slow. They have too much poorly =

>written code in NT. In order to get a good performance, I need to get 
>a much more powerful pc than even with Windows 95 (which is not 
>stable, but at least it's fast). BeOS decided not to care about being 
>compatible with existing apps - and is designed to utilize modern 
>pc's. The result - very simplified! - is that it works incredibly fast =

>(a full startup of the os until the point where you can work with the 
>ui with no problems is app. 20 seconds on a Pentium 166 with 32 MB 
>RAM. NT takes several minutes! 3=AB last time I tested before it seemed=
 
>to be finished booting and starting services), no reboots are required =

>- all changes can be made dynamically!! I haven't seen a crash yet (ok =

>- I haven't worked it as hard as I have ever worked OS/2). The full 
>installation takes app. 15 minutes - and is simple (compared to 
>several Linux distributions) and fully graphical.

I agree that NT is slow to boot - I too see about three-and-a-half minut=
es even though I have a 
Pentium II and 128 Megs of Ram - but really does it matter? I don't boot=
 it very often and it 
doesn't seem to me to make economic sense to expend all time and effort =
necessary to learn  
another operating system to save, at the most, three minutes a day. 

As you say the installation of many applications requires a re-boot  but=
 how often do I install a 
new application? On average may be one a month ... 

Big applications like Word and a Photoshop take a irritatingly long time=
 to open, (if they existed 
for other platforms I don't know if this would be any different), but th=
is irritation is easily 
overcome by having lots of Ram, (which is now very cheap), and simply le=
aving them open. 

(In a forlorn attempt to make this posting even slightly relevant to PMm=
ail  I should say that that 
application opens very fast in NT ...) 


David