Final Win95 beta: Slick, buggy, quixotic August release date looks ambitious By David Berlind Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Company 1995 Microsoft Corp.'s final beta release of Windows 95, known as M8, is not likely to deliver an impressive out-of-box experience to most corporate evaluators. Just as improbable as a flawless beta experience will be Microsoft's ability to guarantee smooth Windows 95 installation and operation across all Intel-based PCs by August. Microsoft may never be able to make this assurance, given the operating system's complexity. The product was made available to current beta testers during the past 10 days and is expected to be made available to another 400,000 paying users within the next two weeks. Microsoft reaffirmed the August date Thursday. Because Microsoft and IBM cannot exercise the degree of control that Apple does over its operating system's hardware, PC Week Labs considers compatibility for 100 percent of the Intel-based machines to be an impossible task. Based on our investigation of M8, users' experiences will fall within a spectrum: Some users will encounter a failed installation requiring Microsoft's intervention, whereas others will easily get past installation. As a result, Microsoft may find itself facing the same rocky launch IBM had with OS/2 Warp. In fact, Microsoft is probably no more capable of delivering a sophisticated operating system that accommodates all the vagaries of the installed base. Another challenge will be meeting Windows 95's targeted delivery date of August. Based on bugs encountered by PC Week Labs and those reported in on-line forums (including The Microsoft Network, MSN), this goal will be tough to meet without sacrificing compatibility with some hardware and software. While Microsoft has fixed major bugs found in earlier betas, it is still wracked by dozens of small but nettlesome problems. These include ``invalid system disk'' after installation, incompatibilities with graphics accelerators, inconsistent modem initialization, random juxtaposition of icons in the Control Panel, and systems that always boot into fail-safe mode. Even though the initial experience following installation can be impressive, lifting the hood reveals that interface and networking issues remain. When we requested a notebook installation for our IBM 750C ThinkPad, Dial-Up Networking did not install properly. The prerequisite PCMCIA and modem drivers, which should have installed automatically, did not. Once installed, Dial-Up Networking (which relies on a Remote Access Server connection) exhibited inconsistent drive-mapping behavior from one session to the next and, moreover, was mercurial with the way in which Windows 95 interacts with the network when locally attached. Regardless of how we attached to the network, Windows 95 did not gracefully recover from a disappearing mapped drive, which PC Week Labs considers an absolute requirement of new-generation operating systems. Is OS/2 a tough act to follow? Newcomers to Windows 95 will find a radically different and improved interface compared with prior versions of Windows. The rusty program and file managers have been replaced, respectively, with a better, quicker menuing system and a desktop metaphor that takes excellent advantage of the mouse's right button. In addition, the 32-bit characteristics of the operating system give users access to all of their applications almost all of the time. Users, however, will also find that some common operations, such as copying files, may not be intuitive. This, along with the major UI changes, will lead many to conclude that a substantial retraining effort, on the same order as that required of OS/2 Warp, is necessary before upgrading entire organizations. Windows 95 also performs similarly to OS/2 running 16-bit Windows applications. In fact, 16-bit applications run slower under M8 than they did under M7. The PC Week Labs results for both systems were a photo finish. Microsoft has said it expects performance to change little between now and the final release of Windows 95. Differentiating Windows 95 from OS/2 are Microsoft applications and APIs for messaging (universal in-box and Messaging API), telephony (TAPI [Telephony API]), and networking (transport protocols, requesters, and remote access). These are found and are sometimes implemented in the trend-setting Macintosh. Throwing the kitchen sink into a first release may come back to haunt Microsoft. Our tests showed some of these differentiating features possess design flaws that could be present when the product emerges from beta in August for the promised general availability. One flaw is the location management, which is a part of TAPI. By including the client for MSN in Windows 95, Microsoft has blown the opportunity to demonstrate good location management by failing to permanently assign local MSN access numbers to each location that the user creates. Whether this is a weakness in the API itself, or the MSN client's exploitation of it, is unclear. About the only noticeable functional difference between M7 (a.k.a. Build 224) and M8 (a.k.a. Build 347) is the disappearance of Winpad Organizer. Is Windows 95 still worth examining? Absolutely. Many of the positives we've identified in earlier coverage stand. But, given that organizations will eventually have to upgrade systems anyway, we recommend examining in painstaking detail all the options before deciding.