Area:    FREEPORT
 Date:    31 Aug 95  17:30:38  Public
 From:    chuck bridgeland
 To:      all
 Subject: win95
 
 

Thought you-all might want to hear my Windows 95 experience.

On Monday my boss gave me a copy of Win95 to take home and attempt
to load.  I spent Monday cleaning up my system, making 100MB
available on c:, virus scanning, defragging, norton disk-dr.ing,
etc.  I made a full tape backup with verify.  I made backup copies
of config.sys, autoexec.bat, windows\*.grp, *.ini and *.pif files to
a subdirectory.  I wrote down the IRQ, address and DMA of all
installed cards.  That system was _clean_--no conflicts, everything
worked right.  Also note that I had _no_ trouble installing OS/2 2.1
or Warp.  This is a no surprises AMI BIOS generic clone, like
millions of others out there.

Tuesday I do the install.  The readme says that QEMM causes
problems, so I switch to himem/emm386.  The readme says that
lantastic server shouldn't be loaded, so I rem it out.  Boot to DOS,
change to the CD and run setup.  I choose to not to install over my
current Windows.  All goes well for a while.  Win95 detects my
modem, then my mouse cursor disappears.  Good thing I'm up on
keyboard equivalents.  Onward we go.  Win95 detects the make and
model of my network card, but gets the irq and address wrong (OK, so
you can fix this eventually in the control panel).  Win95 attempts
to send a test page to my printer.  Nothing prints.  Setup procedes
to completion.  I reboot ("Starting Windows 95. . ."!) and the
system comes up to the windows desktop.  (It blows away Boot
Manager, but this is documented in the readme along with the
procedure for reenabling it.)

Window95 detected that I had a Trident video card.  It defaulted to
16 color mode but offered a 256 color mode.  I select that and start
having problems.  Windows 95 hereafter would either hang on boot,
boot in 16color mode, or boot in 256 color mode but with no mouse
(and what does the color depth have to do with the mouse?!?).
Windows 95 offered the option of using windows 3.1 drivers.  I tried
this but it just got me into deeper problems.  It's late, I decide
to hang it up and tomorrow I'd uninstall and try it again.

(Oh, yes.  No more GPFs.  They're now called fatal exceptions.  I
saw a couple.  Familiar blue screen.)

Wednesday I try to run uninstall.  Uninstall won't run.  I decide to
do it manually.  I boot off a dos 6.2 floppy and try to sys the
drive.  No luck: "no room for system on destination disk".  Norton
disktool is able to make my c: bootable with 6.2.  I boot clean,
copy my startup files out of their hiding place and reboot.  Files
are missing.  My cdrom driver, lantastic files and mouse driver are
missing--as in "file not found"!  ("hnuh?!?!").  I run Norton Disk
Doctor on general principles.  It finds a subdirectory with invalid
files, but is unable to fix it (PCTools Diskfix was able to fix it).
 Remember, this system was clean 2 days previously.  At this point I
decide to reformat and restore from tape.

Three days shot.  No progress.  This is my payback for not having
had any problems with DOS 6.0.

So, who wants to move their business over to Windows 95?

--- PPoint 1.88
 * Origin: anarchoRepublican point (1:2270/868.6)