Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uunet!ncis.tis.llnl.gov!finfrock
From: finfrock@ncis.tis.llnl.gov (Scott Finfrock)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Re: Deskview or Windows?
Message-ID: <1071@ncis.tis.llnl.gov>
Date: 21 Sep 90 16:24:27 GMT
References: <1990Sep13.154000.3257@mks.com> <35010016@hpfinote.HP.COM>
Reply-To: finfrock@ncis (Scott Finfrock)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore CA
Lines: 70

In article <35010016@hpfinote.HP.COM> pnl@hpfinote.HP.COM (Peter Lim) writes:
>> We use Deskview 2.26 on a pair of PS/2 70's.  We bought a copy of
>> Windows 3.0 (for another machine) and tried it on the 386's.
>> We didn't like it very well.  It was pretty but it seemed much
>> harder to set up and use then Deskview.  It could be that it just
>>
>Where are you from ?  :-). Windows is harder to setup than DesqView ?
>Well .... I can only think of one situation where that will be true.
>That is if you only run DOS programs and no Windows program. Even
>that, given that you have a 386 machine; you should be able to just
>run the Windows setup and when that finish, type WIN to start running
>Windows.
>
[various belittlements of my problems deleted]

Well this is kind of the boonies but I'm not totally incompetent :-)

Your argument seems to be that you just set up the code, run it
and it works.  Well the problem is it didn't work.  Now thats not
to terrible in itself, deskview isn't all that easy to get right
either.  The real problem was that we couldn't figure out whether
the problems came from the way we had it setup or the way we were
trying to use it.  As a result we couldn't get it to do what we wanted.

Let me be more specific about what we did.  We ran three tests
on both windows and desqview:

1. Go to DOS, run as per normal
2. Set up 3 windows, Wordperfect, Lotus, and a database, have
	at least one executing continously (say, an onscreen clock), 
	and switch back and forth between the three.
3. Set up 3 windows, each running a graphics program.

Results:
Desqview
1.  No problem
2.  No problem, clock continued to be updated even when that
	 window was not the active one.
3.  No problem.  All three windows updated the screen, albeit  slowly.

Windows 3.0
1.  No problem here either.
2.  Windows initiated ok but clock did not update when window wasn't
	 active.  Had real problems switching between windows.  Got 
	 intermittent error messages that said window could not be activated
	 for some reason (I don't recall the exact wording) but the
	 message was ambigous and the manual was no help.  We played around
	 with this a lot and eventually made some progress but we never
	 really understood what windows was expecting us to do here.
3.  Windows just plain refused to do this.  It would not open more
	 than one graphics window.


To reiterate I had no problem executing windows, it was running
multiple programs under windows that I had trouble with and after all
that is the whole point, I don't need windows just to go to DOS.

I have no doubt that most (all?) of the problems I encountered
were problems with me, not with the code.  The issue IMHO is
ease of use, not functionality.

As a final note I spent about half a day with both codes.  That
was enough time for me to feel completely confident with desqview
but after the same period of time there was no way I could have
used windows effectively.


-- 

					  -Scott Finfrock-