![[win95.gif]](win95.gif)
The press remains full of speculation and rumor over the
anticipated release of Windows
95. Microsoft continues to stand by its expected August 24 ship
date, but no one is holding their breath. It will ship when it ships,
won t it?1 The real question for computer
users at UNT should be, when Windows 95 finally does ship, what will
that mean to us? A number of computer support people in the Computing
Center and elsewhere around the campus have already been evaluating
the various final beta versions (there are more than one) of Windows
95 for several months now. As one of those early beta users, I can tell
you that you will have to have it, but also that it is not quite
ready for prime time yet. Considering my two months of fairly intense
Windows 95 use, four things appear to me to be clear already.
First, the interface has a significantly
different feel from Windows 3.1, and there will be some transitional
adjustment for every user who switches. Even my experienced helpdesk
consultants had to get past the initial shock of not knowing where
anything was, or how to operate it. Once you have made the adjustment,
however, Windows 3.1 will feel clunky and antiquated by comparison. Even
the applications feel different, since they use the standard Windows
95 dialog boxes for many routine functions.
Macintosh users will not necessarily have an advantage, either, as
the environment only appears to be similar at first glance. Many
comparable functions, such as placing an alias on the desktop (called a
shortcut in Windows 95), are actually much easier to do in Windows 95
than on a Macintosh. Concepts such as folders and long file names
are very similar to the Macintosh, but other procedures are completely
different, such as the massive increase in right-mouse button
functions incorporated into Windows 95. Using the right-mouse click to
pull up a functional menu is actually the preferred method of doing
business, just about everywhere in Windows 95.
Some of
the tools have changed significantly, too, with file manager being split
up into Explorer (file and network functions) and My Computer (disk
drive functions). The cumbersome Program Manager has disappeared
behind a more efficient combination of desktop icons and a new Start
button with its own cascading menus. You soon will find yourself
taking shortcuts as a matter of course, such as putting an icon for
your network printer on the desktop, dragging files to it to print from
Explorer, and double-clicking on it to view the status of your print
job in the printer queue. IMHO (in my humble opinion), the best part of
Windows 95 is the task bar on the bottom of the screen. Every program
you launch appears on the task bar, and each can be minimized
to the task bar. You then open a window to any running program by single
clicking on the task bar. Although the old [alt/tab] speed key
combination to change between program windows still works, and has
been improved to show everything that is running at once, you may find
that the task bar works better for you. This is a good example of
another characteristic of Windows 95; there are always several different
ways to accomplish the same thing. The task bar will become even more
significant when applications are re-written specifically for the
Windows 95 interface. The Office 95 suite uses the taskbar to drag and
drop selected items between applications without having to re-size
those applications to adjacent areas of the screen. In fact,
drag-and-drop works everywhere in the Windows 95 interface, the way you
think it should have all along.
The
second point I will make is that whatever you were doing in Windows, you
will do it noticeably faster in Windows 95. All of the Windows
applications we use now on campus run significantly faster in the
Windows 95 full 32-bit environment, even if they are still 16-bit
applications. Word, Excel, WordPerfect,
and so on, all run faster than they do on the same machine under
Windows 3.1. Much of this is due to the way Windows 95 makes use of
32-bit drivers for the hard disk, network and video cards, and file
access. Many of the more inefficient parts of the old DOS-based
plumbing have been replaced by the Windows 95 drivers. Internet
applications in particular, operating over the Microsoft 32-bit TCP/IP
stack instead of Trumpet Windows Socket, fairly scream in terms of
data throughput. Only DOS applications stay pretty much unchanged.
Running DOS apps in a DOS window is not noticeably faster, but you can
run more of them, with better stability than before.
My third observation is that
once users have made the transition to Windows 95, they will enjoy a
smoother, easier to use, and significantly more robust work
environment. By robust, I mean much harder to crash than the current
Windows 3.1 system. Error recovery, even in the beta releases, is much
better than in Windows 3.1. The few programs that have succeeded in
locking up the beta have been ones that the vendor has admitted must
be re-engineered to work properly with Windows 95. These include
programs that go around the standard Windows 3.1 procedure calls to
address your hardware directly, or that used some portion of DOS that
Windows 95 has abandoned. In any case, the beta version of Windows 95
is in many ways already more stable than the production version of
Windows 3.1. Where Windows 95 starts having problems is in
communicating with NetWare,
specifically NetWare 4.1 directory services; more on this in my fourth
observation.
Using Windows 95 also means not running out
of system memory resources every time you try to load another program.
I have cluttered my test system up with three or four DOS sessions and
even more active Windows applications before the response time slowed
enough to notice, and then went on to run all day without incident. A
key point is that all the network drivers, CD-ROM and sound drivers, and
other memory resident programs you used to load in DOS before starting
Windows are now loaded by Windows 95 into places where they do not
significantly affect system resources. Programs I could not run under
Windows 3.1 while my CD-ROM and sound card were active are running
fine in Windows 95, with conventional memory to spare. Also,
Windows 95 really is (finally) a multitasking environment. I am
formatting disks with My Computer while writing this article. Do NOT
try doing that in Windows 3.1; it is a complete waste of time. In
Windows 95, there is only a slight slowdown to the other applications
that is just barely noticeable.
My fourth observation is that the current beta versions of
Windows 95 are not yet ready to operate properly on a NetWare 4.x
campus like ours, one that is moving rapidly towards NDS (NetWare
Directory Services) and NDS dependent software (GroupWise). It
currently ignores all aspects of NDS and will not run the GroupWise
clients. We do not expect this to be remedied until the Microsoft and
Novell NetWare requester layers for Windows 95 are released this fall,
opening the door from Windows 95 to NDS. Since a beta of the Microsoft
NetWare requester for Windows NT is already out, this may come sooner
instead of later. The Novell version will probably take longer (they
have said it will come out 90 days after Windows 95 is released), but
it will probably be a better choice for our NetWare-centric campus.
Even with these limitations, Windows 95 is dramatically more network
aware than any previous version, and has much better tools for
navigating the campus local area networks. It will share drives and
files under either Microsoft network or NetWare network protocols,
although there are some pitfalls and limitations. Again, many of our
networking concerns may be resolved when the NetWare requester products
arrive. They will have to be before the widespread implementation of
Windows 95 can be accomplished comfortably on our campus.
One area I have not
touched on yet is installation and device support. The installation
program for Windows 95 really is as smart as they have advertised. It
will go out on your machine and identify the network interface card,
the CD-ROM and sound card, the video card, the modem, and usually gets
them right on the first try. It is much, much more hardware and
network aware out of the box, and installing it has been relatively
easy when you realize that half of what it does required help from
your network support staff in the past. Do not get me wrong; the
support staff will still have a lot to do to get you set up with Windows
95 when we finally have all the pieces to implement it on campus. They
will have to hand enter the TCP/IP information on your individual
machines before you can use any of the Internet tools, and they will
have to decide what file sharing modes you can use since one of them
is rather troublesome on NetWare networks. What this does mean,
however, is that getting your home machine upgraded to Windows 95 should
be a lot easier than working with Windows 3.1 has been in the past.
Another home-use issue that
Windows 95 may go a long way to solve will be remote access to UNT
computer systems. It has built-in SLIP and PPP support, and once we
begin supporting PPP connections over our dial-ins it will offer users
one more way of making that connection. It may be easier to use than the
windows socket software we are testing now, but we will not be sure
until we are able to test the production version.
To this observer, Windows 95 looks like it will be the desktop
operating system you want on your machine by the end of the year. I
certainly want it on mine. How fast we can implement it on campus
depends on how rapidly we are able to resolve some outstanding
networking issues. What is already clear is that Windows 95 is a far
better work environment than Windows 3.1. Our previews of Office 95,
the Microsoft applications suite for Windows 95, have also shown us
that the 32-bit application software designed to exploit its features
will be the software that you want to use. If for no other reason than
that, there will be increasing pressure to move to Windows 95 as this
year closes. Start thinking about it now.
Footnote #1:According to TIME Daily (http://www.timeinc.com/time) for Friday, July 14, 1995, Microsoft completed it's master golden code for Windows 95 that day. TIME called it the single most significant consumer event for the computer industry this year. According to TIME, Microsoft will now manufacture 1 million copies of the program a week at 12 locations around the country to be ready for sales August 24. The Justice Department has still not decided whether to take steps to prevent Microsoft from selling Windows 95 with software for its imminent online service, the Microsoft Network. Stay Tuned!-ED.
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