Re: Windows Machines

Tim Byars (tbyars@earthlink.net)
Fri, 30 Oct 1998 09:27:52 -0800


At 9:07 AM -0800 10/30/98, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
>I finally broke down and bought a Windows machine.

I'm sorry.

>
>Disadvantages? It's 10 lbs,

Yeah and probably butt ugly as well.

>Right now I am thinking splitting
>it 70%/30% for Win98 and Solaris. NT 5.0 beta 2
>looks interesting, but having a toy/gaming OS and a real
>work OS leaves little reason to put it on other to
>just take up space.

Yeah, had you bought a PowerBook G3 300 you could have had MacOS, Virtual
PC to run games, some version of Linux. Next year you could have just run
OS-X with MacOS and a game OS (Win95) running in a cute little window. Oh
well...

>
>Some look and feel and setting issues that I am not sure are
>completely related to Windows, 98, or just my inexperience
>of never using Windows before.
>
> o I don't understand the virtual memory settings, under
> specifying your own settings, it suggests 5.9 Meg. Is
> that supposed to be like a swap space? How do you get
> the best performance out of a machine, by letting windows?
> manage it or fixing it to some amount of space? What
> are the performance advantages and disadvantages for
> setting your machine to be a portable, server, or desktop?

The best way I've found is to start VM after real ram runs out and double
that.

64 MB real ram
VM: 65 - 128

> o Why when you grab a scrollbar on any of the windows and need
> to go back to the top or bottom, you have to be extremely careful
> not to drag it too far as it just pops back down to the
> place you started? Who's in charge of HCI up there? I'll
> send them a copy of my Ben Shneiderman book. Simple
> tasks require simple actions and all that.

Because Miicrosoft UI just sucks.

> o How do you get the Windows Explorer when you right click
> on the Start button to come up anywhere else besides
> the Windows Start Menu directory?

See above

> o Why is Windows so stupid and what's with the blue screen?
> Can I customize that color without rebooting my machine?

Blue screen of death? You're going to be seeing that a lot.

Tim

--

The real problem wasn't Internet Explorer, it's the fact that people use the Windows operating system. - Simson L. Garfinkel

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