Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-pcd!hp-sdd!apollo!nelson_p
From: nelson_p@apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: programs crashing in Desqview
Message-ID: <4926e58c.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 12 Mar 90 16:14:00 GMT
Sender: root@apollo.HP.COM
Distribution: usa
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Apollo Division - Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 41


 dhinds@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds) posts...

>     Given Desqview's enormous installed base, is it any surprise that
>"many" people have had problems with it, given the extreme heterogeneity
>of DOS programs and environments?  I consider it to be amazingly good at
>doing what seems at first to be a truly impossible task.

  Right.   This is what's referred to as a "talking dog", i.e., 
  it doesn't matter *how well* it does it; it's a wonder that it
  can do it at all!  

  My complaint with Desqview is that they didn't make clear how 
  many limitations their program has, even when I directly asked them
  about this!  I was aware of the difficulties in what Desqview is
  trying to do so I told them up front that many of the programs I
  run use graphics, that they are not commercial applications but
  rather programs written in C or C++, and that the few commercial 
  applications I DO use are disk utilities and backup programs, both
  of which mess around with the hardware.   Two different people 
  at Desqview said, in effect, "no problem".   

>     From what I remember about your Zortech C graphics program problem,
>the 386 was trapping a protection violation of unknown origin.  So, the
>program was executing instructions that violate the privileges given to
>a Virtual 86 task. 

 You're confusing this with some other problem.  Under Desqview, the
 Zortech graphics routines merely hang the machine at random intervals
 or scribble randomly all over the screen or cause other programs
 (including Desqview when it goes into graphics mode) to screw up
 in dramatic ways.    But even with protection mode set to [3] I
 got no messages from Desqview when all this was going on.  I did,
 however, get lots of messages from Desqview about *other* programs,
 including many DOS commands when I had protection mode > 0.

                                                       ---Peter