Nov 95 Features

BY: By David Gabel, Reviews Editor and Serdar Yegulalp, Assistant Technical Editor

What will happen when you upgrade to Windows 95? Will it make your computing experience faster and better? Will you need new and speedier hardware? Is it likely your current hardware and software won't work with it at all or won't do it justice?

What could be a greater pleasure for a Windows user than to break the shrink wrap on a brand spanking-new copy of Windows 95? Getting the new operating system up and running, that's what.

There's more to upgrading to Windows 95 than just sticking in the disks and running the Setup program. Getting used to the new operating system and ensuring that the same kind of work you've done before is still possible—and if not, learning how to make it possible—are part and parcel of the upgrading gambit.

Herewith are the major landmarks every user will come across while upgrading, along with some important things to watch for in each case.

During the installation process, the following screens come up:

1) The welcoming box, license agreement, "routine check" (actually ScanDisk) and Setup Wizard prep. (All of this is automatic.)

2) The selection of the install directory and a check that there's enough space.

3) Installation type: Typical, Portable, Compact or Custom. (Choosing a Custom install gives you the widest variety of options, but most people will be happy with Typical if they're running a desktop computer.)

4) The Building the Hardware list. This part is slow. Get a cup of coffee.

5) The Get Connected screen. This contains options to install Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Fax and the Microsoft Network. If you're already using MS Mail 3.x, don't install any of these.

6) The Select Components screen, which allows you to select or leave out various Win95 components. Again, if you're using MS Mail 3.x, don't load Exchange, Fax or MS Network.

7) The Network Configuration and Login ID screens. Network settings from Windows 3.x (if any) should be properly migrated here. Take a moment to check.

8) Computer Settings (appears in Custom install only). This lets you change some crucial hardware settings before installation (keyboard, mouse, video, etc.). Best left alone unless you are certain something on the list is wrong.

9) Startup Disk. Choose Yes and get a blank floppy. Better safe than sorry.

10) Copying Files. Fix another cup of coffee.

11) Reboot. Some machines may not reboot properly after the installation process concludes. A simple press of the Reset button or a flick of the power switch should set everything right.

The first reboot will take anywhere from three to five minutes, so don't panic if the system seems to be stuck on that opening screen for an unduly long time. If the system stops dead with no disk activity for more than five minutes, turn the machine off and then back on again. As with other phases of the installation, Windows 95 is smart enough to know where it left off.

Ask any Windows 3.x user to name the least favorite part of Windows, and chances are strong it's our old friend Program Manager—nonintuitive, clumsy and downright ugly (compared with the clean, elegant look that Windows 95 sports out of the box). But before Win95 came along, many users—as well as programmers and software companies—took it upon themselves to improve their situation. Improvement meant adding alternate desktops or shells like Hewlett-Packard's Dashboard (a floating toolbar with configurable buttons) and Norton Desktop (a Mac-like desktop with floating icons).

Upon installation, Windows 95 checks the SHELL= line in SYSTEM.INI. This contains the name of the program Windows uses for a shell, and warns the user if it's anything other than PROGMAN.EXE (Program Manager). Most shareware shell programs are not overly complicated and don't make any adjustments to the system that Win95 can't flag. But more sophisticated programs like Dashboard or Norton Desktop make many more changes, and the Win95 installation program may not detect them all. Win95's Setup program will try to get things the way you want them, based on the evidence of your system, but if it can't detect everything you've done with a third-party desktop replacement, all you'll get from the installation process is a broken desktop—and, by association, a broken system.

Norton Desktop, for example, uses a file format called .QAG, or Quick Access Group, instead of the usual Program Manager .GRP group files. Windows 95 doesn't convert .QAG files into Start button shortcuts, and so all of the work put into setting up those groups is lost. (This particular problem does have a solution: Norton Desktop comes with a utility to convert .QAG files back into Program Manager groups, so you should re-convert your .QAG files before installing Windows 95.)

Other third-party add-ons can cause trouble, too, especially programs that are eclipsed by an existing Win95 feature. One of the more common programs of this type, Outside In, is replaced by Win 95's Quick View feature (which is, in fact, a licensed version of Outside In). It does not, however, uninstall Outside In; that task falls to you, and you should do it before you install Windows 95.

In addition, third-party systems such as Sherlock or HP NewWave that support long filenames will not migrate to Windows 95. This includes the long filenames in OS/2. (Windows NT's long filenames on FAT volumes are the only ones that interoperate successfully with Windows 95.)

While Windows 95 is compatible with the vast majority of hardware and software that runs under Windows 3.x, there's always the chance that something you have won't be on the compatibility list. (The hardware and software lists are available at ftp: //ftp.microsoft.com/peropsys/win_news. They are both Windows .HLP files, making them readable to just about everyone already running some variety of Windows.)

The way Windows 95 handles hardware and hardware drivers is far more sophisticated than the typical DOS/Windows 3.x solution. Drivers loaded in DOS gobble up low memory, leaving you with the illusion of running out of memory even though there seems to be plenty of it; you just run out of low-memory resources. Windows 95 has a library of 32-bit, Win95-based drivers for the vast majority of devices out there, including PCMCIA- and SCSI-based hardware. When you install Windows 95, it detects which devices are loaded and, if possible, swaps out the DOS-based (16-bit) drivers for Windows 95 drivers. Win95 is sensitive to devices that can't be upgraded to 32-bit drivers (usually because the manufacturer has not supplied a 32-bit driver yet) and lets you keep the existing 16-bit drivers.

One of the better examples of falling back on 16-bit drivers we came across while upgrading our own systems concerned a Zenith Data Systems PCMCIA-based CD-ROM reader. The controller card wasn't listed in the Windows 95 PCMCIA drivers list. The only way to get it running was to disable 32-bit PCMCIA control entirely—and, of course, use Zenith's DOS (16-bit) driver. In due time, Zenith will probably provide its own Windows 95 driver; fortunately, Win95 was designed to allow precisely the kind of backward compatibility we needed. In general, you should try to have as much of your system as possible use 32-bit drivers.

Another category of hardware that will probably stick with at least partial DOS support is sound cards, especially jumperless cards that use DOS programs to initialize IRQ/DMA/memory address settings. Crystal Semiconductor and Ensoniq are two manufacturers that put out such boards. If there's no Windows 95 driver for a specific sound card (i.e., if it registers as "Microsoft Sound System Compatible" or "Sound Blaster compatible"), Windows 95 may update the 16-bit Windows-based drivers to generic 32-bit ones, which consequently ignore the DOS-based programs' settings and just plain don't work.

Here's one way to get around the problem: After running the Windows 95 upgrade, open up the Control Panel, double-click on the Multimedia icon, and click on the Advanced tab of the Multimedia Properties window. One of the listed categories should be Audio Devices. Double-click to produce a sublist of the current sound drivers. Click on the driver you want to remove (highlighting it) and then click on Properties. One of the buttons in the next window that appears is labeled Remove; click on it. Then close everything down and reboot, and use the installation program provided with the sound card to load the needed drivers.

But don't be surprised if this problem doesn't appear. In one upgrade, we had been unable to install a particular sound card under Windows 95 using the Add Hardware Wizard. So we installed the same sound card in a Windows 3.11-based machine, ran the DOS-based install program to get the sound card working, and then upgraded to Win95. The upgrade went fine, and the sound card worked like a charm. So try the upgrade first and assume that there will be no problem; chances are you'll be right. (One area we've found where this "trust-the-install" strategy doesn't work is in the case of ISA Plug-and-Play cards that have their own DOS Plug-and-Play manager.)

And then there's the software. Again, the vast majority of DOS/Windows software will run flawlessly under Windows 95, including some of the trickier games, but there are always exceptions. Win95 beta testers found many of these exceptions, and Microsoft put a set of special entries in the Registry that contain the names of programs that may cause problems. If you run one of those programs, a warning box pops up with details about its effects.

There are undoubtedly problem programs that didn't make the list, however. Be especially aware of DOS programs that perform low-level disk writes, and older DOS games.

As with the operating system, so it is with your applications. Chances are good you'll also be upgrading your Microsoft (and soon your third-party) applications to Windows 95 versions. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you do so:

• Some files generated by Windows 95 applications are by default not directly compatible with older versions of the same apps. PowerPoint for Windows 95, for instance, adds too many new features for its files to be backward-compatible. Fortunately, all these apps have the ability to save older versions of their files. If you're sharing files with someone who hasn't upgraded, make sure that person can read your files.
• Applications written for Windows 95 can now run on Windows NT 3.51, provided they don't take advantage of features found in Windows 95 and not in NT (such as Plug and Play, Unimodem drivers or custom device drivers). The reverse is also true: NT apps can run on Windows 95, provided they don't exploit NT-specific features (like the NT File System or Unicode, the NT system for storing international character sets). If you upgrade an existing 16-bit application to a 32-bit NT version for lack of a 95-specific version, make sure that you won't be penalized for not having NT features.
• Installing a Windows 95 upgrade to an existing application should give you the option of installing on top of the older version of the program, and thereby migrating existing data and settings. Note also that uninstalling a Win95 program is much more straightforward, courtesy of the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs applet; all Win 95-compatible programs are registered and can be removed easily.
• At first, MS Mail 3.x users will probably not want to upgrade to MS Exchange (the replacement for MS Mail, which also provides connectivity to third-party mail services like CompuServe and the Internet). If you're using MS Mail Remote, upgrading to Exchange will overwrite some of your existing files and prevent you from using the MS Remote Mail server. Also, the conversion from MS Mail to Exchange is a one-way street: Once you convert, there's no going back. Make sure you back up your mail files (.MMF) and uninstall Microsoft Mail before trying this.

There are at most two places in Setup where it may ask you to install MS Exchange: the Additional Components screen (which appears only when you do a Custom install), and the screen that gives you the option of installing faxing software and the Microsoft Network. Make sure you're not installing Exchange in either of those places, but that's easier said than done; faxing and the Microsoft Network both require Exchange, so you might wind up installing Exchange without realizing it. You can always add MS Exchange later through the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs applet. At that time, you will have to migrate existing MS Mail 3.x data files.

Keep in mind that without Exchange installed, conventional MS Mail 3.x will work fine.

Once you have gone through the upgrade process, you get your first reward: an interface that borrows a lot from the classic Win 3.x look but adds a few new things like the taskbar. Expect to set aside a couple of hours to play with Windows 95 and get used to the way the interface behaves. Here are the most significant differences:

• The "go-away" box. This is the best term for the upper-right-hand corner of a window, where there are now three boxes instead of two. The leftmost of the three is still Minimize; the next one is Maximize/Restore, and the rightmost one (with the X in it) is the same as Close. You'll learn quickly not to click the rightmost box, as you did in Win 3.x, to maximize the window.
• The menu bars. You no longer have to hold down the mouse button while sweeping through a menu bar. You can click on the menu bar once to drop down a menu, and then click again when you get to the option you need. To close up the window again, all you have to do is either click somewhere outside the menu, or click on the menu bar itself once more.
• The title bars. Right-clicking on the title bar of a window (where the application or filename is) gives you the same menu as if you'd clicked the upper-left-hand corner of the window.
• The taskbar. One common question users have about Win95's taskbar (it appears at the bottom of the screen after the upgrade process, and it contains the Start button as well as icons for all programs you have running) is how to move it. It's easy enough to click and drag when there's no icon on it, but if it's crowded, most people wind up grabbing the edge that's nearest the middle of the screen and resizing it instead.There's one part of the taskbar you can always grab hold of: The space between the tray (which holds the clock) and the icon nearest to it is always at least slightly open. Clicking and dragging from there will let you move the taskbar; right-clicking brings up options such as Cascade, Tile, Minimize All Windows and Properties.

by: Serdar Yegulalp

If your system fails during the installation process, the safest thing to do is turn the machine off, wait a few moments, then power it back up again and rerun the Windows 95 Setup program. Don't use Ctrl+Alt+Delete to reboot. At some point, just after the initial welcome screens and licensing information, the program will warn you that the install was interrupted and ask if you want to use Smart Recovery. Windows 95 logs every action it takes during the upgrade, and the Smart Recovery portion of Win95's Setup reads this log to determine the last thing it did. Then it picks up where it left off.

Use this method unless, for some reason, your system configuration has changed between the time you killed the power and the time you turned the machine back on. Say the machine failed during installation and you powered down the system, decided to open the computer to make sure everything was OK and discovered a loose expansion card, which you then installed correctly. In that case, skipping Smart Recovery and restarting the installation from scratch would be best.

by: Serdar Yegulalp

by: David Gabel, Reviews Editor, and Serdar Yegulalp, Assistant Technical Editor

The answer to this question is an unqualified no. We specifically tested to see if Microsoft had been successful in its goal of designing an operating system that will run on a 386-based PC with 4MB of memory. And it was. That's not to say that a 4MB 386 is fast enough to suit most people's tastes, but the point is if you're satisfied (or stuck) with a system like this, Windows 95 won't slow you down any more than Windows 3.x, and it may even run things faster.

In fact, of all the systems we tested, the 4MB 386SX showed the most improvement in application macro scores after upgrading to Win95. This is probably because Win95 manages memory better than Win 3.x. When you run DOS and Windows 3.x, you load up low memory with DOS utilities and drivers that stay put and fill up the memory space, so it's unavailable to Windows programs and Windows itself. (That's why you could get Out of Memory messages in Windows 3.x only to find, when you checked your system statistics, that you in fact had lots of memory. Low memory had been used up because of static-loaded code that couldn't be removed.)

Windows 95, on the other hand, is swappable. It loads a small memory manager before loading itself. If an application needs lots of memory (and what application doesn't these days?), Win95 can swap much of itself out of memory—and even reduce its disk cache size—to make room for the application. For example, Windows 3.x loads device drivers (for peripherals such as displays or printers) statically, and they stay in memory whether they are being used or not. Windows 95 unloads and loads many of its virtual device drivers (VxDs) as it requires them, so the memory for these drivers isn't used up needlessly.

That makes a big difference in a 4MB or 8MB system. In a setup with 16MB of RAM or more, it doesn't make such a big difference. That's why our application scores show huge improvements in application performance for memory-starved systems, but relatively less improvement in the monster systems with 16MB and 32MB.

All that said, let's bring up two caveats. First, our performance graphs show a clear break between performance at the 4MB and 8MB levels, and another between the 8MB and 16MB levels. That's generally true, although you have to consider the speed of the processor as well. For instance, the NEC Versa 2000C notebook computer that we upgraded (watch for a First Impression in the December issue) has 8MB of RAM, but its performance was slightly better than that of the AST Bravo LC 4/66d machine with 16MB installed, probably due to the NEC's 75MHz DX4 processor. Had we upgraded the NEC to 16MB, it's likely we would have seen a jump in performance to that level—but, since the NEC doesn't have L2 cache, not to the level of the Dell notebook.

As we performed this upgrade drama, we did not have access to any final code for native Windows 95 applications. There were plenty of pre-release beta test versions around, but there's many a change between beta code and the release of the final product, including performance optimization. It would have been impossible to gain a true measure of the performance improvement that Win95 brings to those applications.

And that's too bad, because the 486 and Pentium processors on which we tested the apps run best with 32-bit code. This is more pronounced with the Pentium, which is a superscalar processor capable of processing more than one instruction per clock cycle under ideal conditions. "Ideal conditions" in this case starts with the code being 32-bit; there are other requirements as well. Given a 100MHz clock rate, this means you expect to see 200 32-bit Dhrystone MIPS and only 100 16-bit Dhrystone MIPS. Preliminary testing on Win95 with early beta copies of the next version of Wintune bear this out. In other words, the processor reaches full speed only when running 32-bit code.

So, when you look at the charts that show speed improvements in applications, bear in mind that we tested both these operating systems with 16-bit applications (Word, Excel, Painter, and our own Wintune 2.x).

by: David Gabel

Users want to know several things about Windows 95: Will I have to upgrade my hardware to run it? Will my hardware run better? Will I be able to run all of my programs under Windows 95? And where can I get it?

We can't give you definitive answers to the last two questions. We can point you to the list of programs that Microsoft says are not compatible with Win95; you'll have to find the OS for yourself.

But we can help with the first two. To get the answers to those questions, we tested Win95 on a battery of computers, from a lowly 386 PC to a gonzo 90MHz Pentium monster.

First of all, we made sure that we had each machine optimized for operation in Windows for Workgroups 3.11. That meant we enabled 32-bit disk and file access where possible. (Notable exceptions were the Dell Dimension XPS P90 and the NEC Versa 2000C notebook computer, which could not use 32-bit disk access, although they could use 32-bit file access.)

Once we had these machines tuned up, we ran our Wintune test and tuneup kit to get the scores. We ran the full battery of tests three times and averaged the results. Then we loaded up some of our standard application tests: Word 6.0, Excel 5.0 and Fractal Painter. The Word and Excel tests consist of running timed macros. In Word, we load a copy of the U.S. Constitution, change typefaces, select and deselect portions of the text, insert bitmap images and generally muck about with the file. The Excel macro builds a spreadsheet, fills it with values, selects ranges of data for manipulation and builds graphs from the data. In general, the Excel macro is more video-intensive than the Word macro, while the Word macro puts more emphasis on disk usage. In Painter, we execute the pre-saved "Burning Ice Cube" script and hand-time it as another measure of video capability.

Now it was time to upgrade. We installed Windows 95 in the way that made sense to us. If the system was on a network, we installed over the network. If it was a notebook, we used floppies (ditto for the 386). We used the CD-ROM to install Win95 on the AST machine, which did not have a network card installed. Times for the install ranged from 21 minutes on the 90MHz Dell machine, to 1 hour 4 minutes on the NEC notebook , all the way up to 2 hours 15 minutes on the 386.

Then we ran all the tests again. We used 16-bit applications with the exception of the video player (it's 32-bit in Win95). Our test results are representative of the results you'll get when you install Win95 and run your 16-bit applications. They do not have anything to say about performance improvements you'll see with 32-bit applications, a flood of which should be appearing in the very near future.

The tests provided two types of results: Wintune returned performance scores measured in units per second; i.e., millions of instructions per second (MIPS), millions of floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS), MB per second and millions of pixels per second. The application macro tests, on the other hand, returned elapsed time scores measured in seconds. The greater the Wintune score (speed), the better, but the lower the application macro score (elapsed time), the better.

Our Windows upgrade process started with a sampling of systems both fast and slow, old and new. We upgraded each of these machines, except the 386 and the notebooks, from a base memory configuration to determine how adding memory affects system performance. Generally speaking, the faster the processor, the better the machine performed, and the more memory we installed, the better the system performed.

Dell Dimension XPS P90: The corporate power-user configuration. This system contained an Intel network interface card and was connected to a network. Also installed was a Creative Labs sound card and a CD-ROM drive. This machine could not use 32-bit disk access.

AST Bravo LC 4/66d (DX2/66): The home power-user setup. This computer had a Creative Labs sound card installed, along with a CD-ROM drive, but there was no network interface card.

Gateway 2000 4DX-33V: The typical corporate-user configuration. We installed an Intel network interface card and hooked up this unit to a network, but did not install a sound card. This is similar to the systems used by many editorial staffers at WINDOWS Magazine.

Gateway 2000 386SX/25: The "I really need to save some money for a real system" configuration. A bare-bones computer with 4MB of system memory. Since it's a 386SX, it has no math co-processor.

NEC Versa 2000C: A DX4/75 notebook computer with active-matrix display and 8MB of memory, but without external cache (available on the 100MHz model). This notebook would be a good choice to use on the road.

Dell Latitude XPi P90T: This high-end notebook, with 16MB of memory and a 256KB synchronous-burst level 2 cache, would be perfect for the mobile power user.