Subject: Brad's OS/2 Warp 3.0 Review Date: 27 Oct 1994 16:26:03 GMT Organization: Stardock Systems Inc. ------------------------------------------------- I've been reading rumors that OS/2 Warp is being recalled. Personally, this seems to be because of a reaction to the news media, and not due to any bug in OS/2. I've been using the GA version for over a week now with no problems whatsoever. Here is a review I wrote for it so that those who have not gotten it yet can get an idea of what OS/2 Warp 3.0 is to a typical user (I assume my machine is a fairly basic system). OK, I admit I am writing this article out of frustration with PC Week and the New York Times articles blasting OS/2 Warp 3.0. IBM sent me the gold version of OS/2 3.0 early so that we could ensure that Galactic Civilizations and OS/2 3.0 got along okay -- which they do now. Let me first say that I had severe problems with OS/2 Warp Betas 1 and 2. Beta1 had all sorts of little quirks and bugs that made me take it off the hard drive fairly quickly. Beta2 was an adventure in installation pains that had I not been an OS/2 user for the past few years, I would never have gotten it up. Even then, performance was much worse than Beta1 and it made GalCiv slow to a crawl (Beta2 we're talking about here). So when I received the gamma and later the gold, I was somewhat fearful of what would happen with it. OS/2 Warp 3.0 arrives at the door . . . Installation Mine came on CD ROM, the first one being OS/2 Warp and the second one being the Bonus Pack. I created the two disks (remember, I only received the CD-ROM, not the entire package as it's not shipping yet). I used CDINST.CMD on the CD-ROM drive to create the two disks. I put them in, and all went fine. I selected Easy Install (by the way, Warp2 would have hung by now since it had problems with my Mitsumi CD-ROM). Basically, I selected that and went out to lunch. I came back and selected the various options (e.g., I have a printer, etc). It selected everything else correctly (sound card, CD- ROM, video card, etc). I pressed that and played with the OS while it was installing itself. This should (SHOULD) impress any reviewer: using the OS while it is installing itself! A few minutes later it came up at 640x480x256 (SVGA automatically installed). OS/2 up and running with no problems (first time for me since I've always had problems with it to some degree). First Impressions They changed the logo a bit more from the Gamma. It is now called "OS/2 Warp" on the startup screen. For fun, I changed one of my folders to be the Chicago folder (I can change both parts of the animation, the open and closed so I have a Chicago folder that opens and closes -- pity, Chicago won't have that will it?). I put my resolution to 1024x768x256 by selecting it from the folder options. I then turned on the FastLoad option and made it load Windows as a "Standard Mode" session since my Windows apps already were set to that (this is something that IBM needs to tell people because the modes have to be the same in order for FastLoad to do you any good). The graphics are very zippy, GalCiv plays very very fast in it. I did find some minor swapper problems with Warp if you allow your swapper to start out at a mere 2 Megs of RAM because once it starts to grow, it tends to be pretty conservative at growing. SO, I set it to 8 Megs and it never grows again. (This is a new behaviour from 2.1). Windows programs run very fast under the GA (faster than under Warp2 for sure). In fact, they seem to run on par or a bit faster than Win-OS/2 from 2.1 did but I have not benchmarked them. First impressions were very good. The best OS/2 yet (by the way, I have played with the Chicago Beta and this blows it away -- of course, any OS that won't let you change "My Computer" won't get my vote for best OS! :) ). It also automatically migrated all my applications and put them in the correct folder. For example, it found GalCiv on my hard drive and put "Galactic Civilizations" in the game folder. Similarly, it found Roids, Mahjonng, Doom, Epic Pinball, Simcity 2000, and others and put them in the games folder. Other applications were found and put in their corresponding folders. Trying to Crash the OS I believe my "gift" in life is the ability to crash any OS. Whether it be Solaris, NT, OS/2, Windows (ha!), or DOS and I can find a way to crash it. That is not to say that any of these are unstable. I found Windows 3.1 to be reasonable in terms of stability as long as you knew what to look out for. OS/2 Warp is EXTREMELY stable, much more so than any previous version and it didn't go out the door with serious bugs (i.e. 2.1 had the shutdown problem remember?). I will fault IBM with one serious mistake (IMHO). While OS/2 2.1 was too conservative with its default DOS settings for migrated programs, OS/2 Warp is just the opposite. It gives the migrated games as much leeway as OS/2 will allow and this causes trouble. A few of the games I tried DO run much faster but can crash OS/2. As an example, I can crash OS/2 any time by running Simcity 2000, leaving it (alt-Esc) and then going back to it. The video will hang the entire machine requiring a hard reset. I can go in and fix the problems by changing the DOS settings to be a bit more conservative (XGA_IO_TRAP to ON instead of OFF for example) and get it to work fine. I will applaud IBM for taking serious time out and migrating apps over pretty well. SC2000, for example, has all the command line parameters needed to get it to run. In every Beta or GA of OS/2, hangs have been a major problem for me. Usually, it was the WPS just hanging itself and not being able to recover via ctrl-Esc (not everybody has WatchCat). OS/2 Warp has not hung on me yet in over a week of use. Speed I know this will upset some but I considered Warp1 and Warp2 Betas to be too slow still. Warp2's folder speed was terrible considering the hoopla IBM was giving improved performance. What particularly bugged me in the second Beta was the fact that when you opened a big folder, it would only load the icons you could see and if you scrolled down, it took a long time. This is all fixed in the GA and it is really quite fast. In fact, it is at least as fast as a Mac (which we have here to do side by side comparisons) in folder opening. The video speed is much better (especially with S3) than the Betas were and somewhat more stable as far as I can tell (I really didn't have problems with it in 2.1 but I did get corruption once in a while). I should also point out that in OS/2 2.1 I was rarely able to get two separate enhanced mode sessions to work correctly. This was important because I use PhotoShop on a daily basis almost and I like the power of scanning in the background with it while PhotoMorph is doing its own thing in its session while I am using my favourite terminal, Crosstalk for Windows. By the way, other than Quicken, these are the only Windows apps I use (well, okay, I have PageMaker also for resumes and such). There is a rather stupid myth that has been around that each Windows session used something like 2 Megs of RAM. This has always been baseless as with a good memory viewer (like MEMU), you can easily find out that the overhead per session is quite minimal (less than 400K). The Bonus Pack Now my favourite part. The Bonus Pack is just incredible. The word processor, spreadsheet, and graphing program are just absolutely great for a works package. They are also the fastest GUI applications of their kind I have ever used. Printing from one of them? No wait whatsoever. The thread starts immediately. They are very SOM enabled, you can drag and drop between them easily. My only complaint is that you can't drag and drop external files (like a bitmap) into them like you can in AmiPro/2. It also comes with Video IN which is the precise tool we used to make the Ultimotion video files in GalCiv (along with POV ray tracer for OS/2 which is on Hobbes). With a <$200 card, you can watch TV on your computer. Of course, doing that will make you "king of the nerds" (just a minute, Vicki is on TV right now, please hold . . . :) ). The Internet networking is quite slick and that New York Times reviewer must have no idea what he is doing. I simply clicked on the Dialer, gave it my name, and more importantly my VISA card number and off I went onto the Advantis Network whose pricing seems to change with the weather. The Internet software is without a doubt the most impressive example of multi-threading I have yet seen. It is slick, well put together, and fast. I can be reading the newsgroups while downloading a file from Hobbes, while doing a search with Gopher. It doesn't slow things down that much because most of the work is on Advantis, not on your system. (I am not writing this from Advantis because I want to KNOW how much it is going to cost first!!! :) ). The Web Browser is pretty easy to get. Simply click on the Upgrade Software icon and the Web Browser shows up. You click on it and download it. It will install all by itself in the background while you are online and you can use it upon the next bootup (I think it required a bootup)! The World Wide Web (WWW) browser is also very slick (I am pretty new to it). You can drag and drop the graphics that show up to it. For example, I went to the Comdex document and it had a cool Comdex logo that shows up. Well, I can grab that neat picture and drop it onto my desktop (I'm sure companies everywhere will love everyone ripping off their art and making little wallpapers out of it! :)). Conclusion So there you have it. In contrast with PC Week and the New York Times, I have had an excellent experience with it. I have not had to reboot my machine since I installed the Internet stuff several days ago. It is quite solid and I do push my machines hard. Some may say "Well, of course he likes it, he works at SDS which makes GalCiv so he's biased!" Trust me, I am writing this on the Internet where I can receive tons of nasty e-mail and be flamed if I am writing BS. In fact, it would be suicide for me to BS about how great Warp is if it weren't true because I would lose credibility on the net which would affect the company I work at (and if it affects them, it would adversely affect me!) So I am writing this as unbiased as I possibly can. Please feel free to repost this so others can know that OS/2 3.0 looks very good -- a little counter balance to what seems to be unfair reporting by the mass media. -------------------------------------------- Brad Wardell Project Manager: OS/2 Multimedia Stardock Systems Inc. (SDS) GalCiv Orders (VISA/MC accepted): FAX: (313)/782-9868 Phone: (313)/782-2248