Subject: Re: comment -- OS/2 Compatibility -------- It depends on what level of computer know how your father has and what he uses the computer for. If you want to play the newest and biggest games, then Win95 is necessary. OS/2 does have lots of games including some very high quality games, such as Trials of Battle, Entrepreneur, Galactic Civilizations, and Avarice. I consider Avarice to be much better and harder than Myst. Also, most new software from big comapnies is for Win95, but generally OS/2 has equivalent software. If you want to run Microsoft Office or WordPerfect then you should get Win95. If you just need a decent word processor, then OS/2 has StarOffice, Lotus Smartsuite, Describe, Clearlook, and IBM Works which is included with the OS/2 CD. If you must have Photoshop or CorelDraw, get Win95. However OS/2 has ColorWorks, PhotoGraphics, and NeonGrafix 3D, which are better. For e-mail applications there is MR/2 ICE, PMMail, and Post Road Mailer. The list goes on and on, as OS/2 has more software than Win95. However, OS/2 software is hard to find in retail stores while Win95 software will be available everywhere. The best sources of OS/2 software are on the Web. Indelible Blue has a large selection of OS/2 software, as does J3. Hardware may be a problem as well. OS/2 drivers are not available for all devices, and some companies have inferior drivers for OS/2. If you're going to get OS/2 you should make sure your hardware has good drivers for OS/2. Most hardware isn't a problem. Soundblaster and AWE32 have OS/2 drivers, but these are not full duplex. http://www.io.com/~timur/crystalos2.html has a list of cards with good drviers. As for video cards, the Matrox Millenium appears to be a good card. I use the Imagine 128. This has decent drivers for 65K colors, but these work poorly under 17 million colors. Other video cards have good drivers as well, but I don't know uch about this. Those are the primary problems about using OS/2. With all this, people still use OS/2 because it has many benefits over Win95. Despite all of Microsoft's claims, Win95 is very crash prone. Its memory management is also weak. It is close to impossible to have a system running for days at a time, because eventually the memory runs out. I have had my OS/2 system on for two weeks now. I only turn it off when a peculiar Netscape bug eats the screen, or when I am leaving for vacation. The system is still usable except for Netscape when this happens. OS/2 has a true object-oriented model while Win95 is only object-based. Most of the time, this only matters for developers, but in this case the effects are significant. Under Win95, a file is identified by its filename's extension, i.e. .zip, .exe, etc. These can then be associated with a single program. However in OS/2, each file can be associated with several programs, and the extension is not necessary, because each file is given a type. Also, Warp 4 has a WarpCenter for launching applications that is much better than the Start button, though OS/2 has a start button as well. There are many more features of this interface. This is the primary reason why I use OS/2. Basically, the interface is more configurable under OS/2 than under Win95 but easier to do than under Unix. Another benefit is the High Performance File System which makes better use of a hard drive than Win95's VFAT. On a 2 GB hard drive with Win95, a file will take up at least 32K of space even if it only a few bytes. This can cause you to lose 30% of disk space. Other benefits include: VoiceType Dictation, which is included with Warp 4. This software lets you speak to your computer and works fairly well. Netscape lets you browse the Web through voice commands. A Java VM is included in Warp 4 and is available for Warp 3 as well. Java applications can be run in the OS instead of a browser. Internet applications are available including telnet, FTP, gopher, e-mail, newsreader, and a web browser. Netscape is available for free for OS/2 users. These internet applications are better than what is available with Win95, especially the FTP host template, which allows for drag-and-drop FTP. Another consideration is the longevity of the platform. There are constant claims that IBM is killing OS/2. This is not the case, as they continue to update Warp v3 with three released fixpaks in the past year. Microsoft on the other hand has discontinued support for Win 3.1 and is likely to do the same for Win95 as they try to push people to Win 98 or Win NT. This takes away the applications advantage and would force you to upgrade. Hope this helps.