Re: XY and on-line sessions

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from "Alarik W. Skarstrom"  03/21/96
12:59am -0500

What we're omitting to say here, though, is that the new, powerful
operating systems do demand significantly more hardware resources to run
satisfactorily, or "happily"; that they are far less tolerant of crappy,
off-spec iron than DOS. And a very good thing, too! It's not enough to
have an OS pre-installed. You're going to need gobs of memory, and it
costs money, you have to accept that; don't even think about it until you
get the bucks together. You don't want 8Meg; you want 16, or preferably
32Meg. If you're going to assemble a system -- deluxe or budget -- you
really must read a few FAQs and monitor the hardware and setup newsgroups
(as Annie suggested). Often you can see right away what's reliable; but to
find out what's problematic, you gotta track the issues for a time. Many
things are subtle. ATI, for example, makes fast video boards, but is
completely incapable of delivering decent OS/2 software drivers -- even
though they issue a revision every couple months. What good will it be if
your ATI board is pre-installed? The drivers are still garbage. Or to
know that the best Matrox drivers are offered, not by Matrox, but by Compaq
-- pre-installers simply don't track these things! The important thing is
manufacturer support, not price. With supported hardware, OS/2 installs
like a charm. I've done more than a dozen installs, with only one that was
troublesome, and it was a $375 back-room 386 Taiwan clone, on a v2.1-Beta
install. Intermittent memory chips, cold solders on the motherboard, bum
A: drive, "factory refurbished" Seagate hard drive that sometimes wouldn't
turn over -- a stinker. OS/2 said, literally, and rightly: "We won't run
this junk." To my mind, that isn't a flaw; that's a feature (ultimately I
did get it to work).

If you want top notch quality at a good price, then you're much better off
doing everything yourself. Instead of being ignorant and a passive
recipient, instead of having a boilerplate system with the same few stupid
icons everybody else has, you'll know why you've chosen your peripherals
and what they claim to do. You'll have the satisfaction of solving your
own problems; the knowledge really helps! You'll save money. And you'll
be far more likely to customize and perfect and invent solutions, which is
what computing was supposed to be about. Don't play dumb! Roll your own.


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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