RE: Upgrade to XyWin or Not?

["Michael P. Kube-McDowell" K-Mac@xxxxxxxx]

> No, I don't agree with you there. Win95 is, inter alia, still quite unstable,
> is not at all sophisticated in its multi-tasking, is substantially 16-bit,
> and has minimal security. NT4, on the other hand, is remarkably stable for me
> (Service Pack issues aside), offers genuine multi-tasking, is totally 32-bit,
> has pretty tight security and allows more than one CPU to be used. But Win95
> is better at Dos windowed sessions!

It's a bit of an apples-and-hand-grenades comparison, since there are
significant hardware issues where the choice between Win95 and WinNT
are concerned. Some systems are best off running Windows for
Workgroups (I have two such here), while others can handle Win95
(I have two such here, though I'm only running Win95 on one of them
so far). I wouldn't try running WinNT on any of the four without
significant hardware upgrades (and, realistically, two of the
systems aren't upgradable).

Returning to the primary subject of this thread--I moved to XyWin as
a form of insurance against obsolescence once it became clear that
XyWrite's brush with IBM had effectively killed it in the
general wp market dominated by Word and WordPerfect (with Ami Pro as
primary wannabe). After ten years as a DOS/command line/batch
file/XyWriteIII guy, I was pulled into Windows circa 3.0 by Corel
Draw (graphics) and Finale (scoring), and found enough benefits
(fonts, printer drivers, data exchange in particular) to the
interface that it became primary/standard on my systems. I
welcomed the appearance of XyWin because it brought those benefits
to my favorite word processor--I bought the
XyWrite IV upgrade, but only used it for a couple of months before
retiring it in favor of XyWin. The only DOS programs I still use
regularly are Lotus Magellan 2.0 and the Genie OLR Aladdin, both of
which I run in DOS windows.

Best,

    K-Mac

  ---] Michael Paul McDowell, writing as Michael P. Kube-McDowell
  ---] Author of THE QUIET POOLS and STAR WARS: THE BLACK FLEET CRISIS
  ---]    For more info: http://www.sff.net/people/K-Mac