XyWrite IV on Vista

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

Three brief observations, in the midst of seriously migrating
from my primary (Windows 2000) computer to Vista Ultimate (been
playing with Vista for 7 months, but now I'm _doing_ it,
preparatory to turning my old machine into a Web server and
restoring XySearch):

1) Memory management is excellent. Tame is not necessary;
XyWrite does NOT gobble up CPU cycles, either when it is running
or when it is in background. In general, XyWrite grabs no more
than 3% of CPU cycles, and 0% when idling (13% when an XPL
program is awaiting a keystroke). Those are very reasonable
numbers. 100% (essentially disabling all other concurrent
processes) was a common occurrence under previous OpSyses.

2) XyWrite hasn't died once on Vista -- not a single crash.
That's truly remarkable, given the extent to which I fiddle with
XyWrite and (frequently) ask it to do impossible or error-laden
operations. On both Win2K and WinXP (and every OpSys that
preceded), under the same stresses, Xy4 crashed quite often.
Moreover, it crashed often for no apparent reason -- under no
stress!

3) Cursor behavior in a Desktop "DOS" window seems to be smooth
and hesitation-free. Granted, I had to strain to see the
"jerkiness" on my other machines (whereas it was blatantly
apparent to some other users), but under Vista I see absolutely
nothing. The cursor tracks typing very closely. Whether this
might be due to the much higher speed of the CPU (and thus
merely masked), I don't know, but I suspect that whatever caused
that problem within the Virtual DOS Machine (ntvdm) was
discovered and fixed. I should note that I replaced the
preloaded NVidia "Aero" video driver for Vista on this ThinkPad
with the latest (non-Aero) driver for XP, in order to get
fullscreen VGA to run XyWrite and other DOS apps. That means
that I sacrifice Windows Media Center and some other visual
perks, but I don't care (PowerDVD is so much better anyway, and
for everything else there's Media Player Classic -- WMC just
gobbles CPU cycles).

Vista has it's own quirks and irritations, but I have found that
with a considerable amount of tweaking and disabling (especially
of User Access Control and of the [preloaded] truly hideous
Symantec security suite), it is fast and very satisfying. It's
always a shock to upgrade to a new machine and watch the speed
of everything take a quantum leap.

One last observation: Vista seems always to issue a warning
when I install legacy programs on this box. That warning is
triggered because the program is not officially supported by
Microsoft. But the warning _implies_ that the program won't
install, won't launch, and will not work -- might even do harm!
It implies that you have to upgrade (which, for things like
Acrobat Pro, means real money). Nonsense! Everything I've
installed works fine. I had to trick the machine into
installing Acrobat v7.10 and Visual Studio 6 SP6, but when I
finally got those programs on the box, they work normally.
Ditto for Nero Burning ROM and many many others. XyWin doesn't
work, but neither did it work (for me) under Win2K or XP -- I
suspect a conflict with my printer driver -- other Win16
(Windows v3.x vintage) apps run just fine. NBWin runs
perfectly, as long as you add VB40016.dll and OC25.dll from some
old machine to [BootDrive]:\WINDOWS\system (NOT system32!).

FWIW...


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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