Windows 95 To upgrade, or not to upgrade? By Richard Hewison Before I start properly, I'd like to point out that this is not a review of Windows 95. I'm not going to explain all the differences between the old Windows and this new '95 version. Suffice it to say that Win 95 looks a little nicer and does things differently. What I am going to write about is my own (and a few friends of mine) experiences with it. I first encountered Win 95 about a month before it was released. I was asked to write a manual for a Win 95 only game and since I hadn't got a Beta version on my own PC, I was loaned a 486 DX2 66Mhz laptop PC with Win 95 already installed. I fiddled around with it for a while, but had to get the manual written quickly so the game could be on the shelves the same day as Win 95 was released (if anyone is interested it made this deadline and was the first official Win 95 game to be released in this country. As a result, it sold over 100,000 copies in the first week!). After this brief encounter, more promises of work on Win 95 product began to surface, so it was time to splash out (reluctantly I should add) and buy the CD-ROM upgrade. Just a few days before Win 95 was released I was interviewed on the local BBC Radio station (Three Counties - Herts, Beds and Bucks) about what Win 95 was and whether it was any good. I went on about how it seems to do things nicer than before, but at the end of the day it isn't going to radically change your PC. I also mentioned that to get the best out of it you really need 8Mb of memory and a fast PC. More on this later! I originally installed Win 95 by upgrading over the top of my old Windows version 3.11. I was surprised to discover that all my installed Windows programs and utilities seemed to work fine under the new operating system. I had been told that earlier Beta Test versions didn't like some of the more popular Windows 3 utils, so this was an unexpected bonus. However, I soon discovered that running DOS programs was a problem. A few ran fine, just by double clicking on their .EXE or .BAT icon. A few others needed to quit out of Win 95 and run in DOS mode (returning to Win 95 afterwards). A few though wouldn't run this way, and by using the DOS prompt I couldn't get enough memory to run them either. I then discovered the tactic of pressing F8 whilst booting the PC. This produces a menu and one of the options is to boot to Command Line only (i.e. DOS). However, this still caused a few headaches because Win 95 changes your boot up files (AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS) and I couldn't get my CD-ROM drive to work at first. It was at this time that a friend of mine told me what to do to install Win 95 and keep DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 intact. I decided to reformat my hard disk and re-install DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11, then install the Win 95 upgrade into a different directory to my existing Windows setup. The only drawback with this method is that if you have any programs installed under Win 3.11, you need to re-install them under Win 95 into the same directory where they already reside if you plan on using them under Win 95. This slight inconvenience aside, all worked fine. To boot your PC to DOS 6.22 as usual, just press F4 when booting and it will use your "...old version of MS-DOS". If you leave the PC to boot on its own it will boot straight into Win 95 instead. However, there is one thing that Win 95 does which makes me wary. Once installed, Win 95 literally possesses your PC. If installed over the top of an old Windows (if you buy the upgrade), it will change your MS-DOS directory (effectively creating MS-DOS v7.00) forever. Even if you install into a separate directory and use the F4 method, you are still no longer allowed to use MS-DOS 6.XX commands DEFRAG and SCANDISK (which I used to run once a week). Win 95 also does something odd to your File Allocation Table (FAT). It uses VFAT which allows the use of longer filenames and comments to DOS files. This is where my problems began. Just a short while after installing Win 95 into a different directory, the FAT on my 528Mb Hard Disk went seriously screwy and in the end my Hard Disk went belly up. I'm not saying Win 95 caused this fatal problem, but it certainly didn't help! No less than four other PCs (owned by various people I know) have all had problems with their HD's FAT since installing Win 95, although mine was the only one to encounter a fatal problem. Windows programs like Word, Excel and various utils seem to run fine under Win 95. They seem faster and they look a little nicer too. Win 95 specific games are also very easy to install and run. I've now written three Win 95 game manuals and they all have Microsoft approved install programs that allow you to uninstall programs cleanly and simply. However, some Win 95 games run very slowly on our 486 DX2 66Mhz machine and I know they would run three times as fast if they were running as DOS programs! This is probably because they are being written with WinG, which is not 32 bit specific. Various utils are available to developers to write proper Win 95 games, but the early releases aren't going to be as fast as they should be. I still prefer to run games from DOS and I think I always will too. However, I recently tried to run a demo of Origin's "Wing Commander IV" under Win 95, and during the install program it read my Double Speed CD-ROM drive as having a transfer rate of 425,000 (approx) when in DOS the same install program reads it as 332,000! Does Win 95 speed up the CD-ROM drive, or is Win 95 causing the install program to read it incorrectly? One interesting aspect of Win 95 is how it treats memory. In theory, you need never worry about having multiple boot-up files or separate boot disks ever again. For example, some games these days require 7Mb of XMS (extended) memory, which means you need to use a boot-up which doesn't use EMM386 (which gives you EMS (expanded) memory). With Win 95 running, you shouldn't need to worry about configuring memory to EMS or XMS - it will give the program what it needs. The only problem comes when dealing with the amount of free base (conventional) memory, as Win 95 does all sorts of things to your boot-up files and so the amount of free memory you used to get through DOS will be different. Don't bother trying to run Win 95 if you've got less than 8 Mb. It will run, but your applications will run out of memory very quickly. 16 Mb is allegedly the ideal setup, but not many of us can afford to spend that much money on memory chips! Whilst Win 95 is quite nippy on an 8 Mb machine, the extra memory in 16 Mb allegedly makes it even faster. At the end of the day, I am still quite happy using Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22. Win 95 looks nicer and is a bit quicker, but it takes a lot longer to boot than the old Windows and I really don't like the way it takes over your PC! It's also processor, hard disk and memory intensive. My hard disk is much more active than it is when running Windows 3.11. Seeing the red light and hearing the drive whirr away most of the time is quite disconcerting! How does it perform on 'lower spec' PCs? Well, a friend of mine took the plunge and bought the full version for his 486SX 25Mhz PC. We were both surprised to see it run fine and we even noticed a distinct speed increase over his old Windows 3.1 when running certain applications. Conclusions are usually reasonably easy to come up with, but in this article I have to admit to being undecided when it comes to recommending Windows 95. On the one hand, it looks nicer, is a little faster and does Windows things a little better than before. On the other hand, running DOS programs can be a little fiddly sometimes (although some of the DOS games that used to be fiddly to run under DOS now run quite easily under Win 95!). The fact that Win 95 is the future O.S. for the PC is (in my opinion) unavoidable. However, Win 3.1X and DOS 6.XX are still installed on an enormous number of PCs so I can't see it killing them all off quite yet! - o -