Text 364, 79 rader
Skriven 2007-01-07 11:30:38 av Peter Knapper (3:772/1.10)
    Kommentar till text 358 av Gord Hannah (1:17/23.1)
Ärende: Versions
================
Hi Gord,

 GH> I can not remember what version and what flavour of 
 GH> OS/2 will do the following right out of the box, sort of.

 GH> Full USB support, the latest MPTS so I can run 
 GH> MRMESSAGE and the latest Mozilla/Firefox.

 GH> I have the ability to go Warp4 to fp15.
 GH> I have the following:
 GH> MCP2, ACP2, and WSeB.

First, the important not so good news...

Unless you have had a ACTIVE support contract with IBM for the last 2 years,
AND have collected all the S/W updates, then NONE of these platforms will have
the latest OS/2 updates available for USB!! 

Now, the good news...

The only general user path available for OS/2 adn USB support is via eCS. 

As a registered eCS user you would have full access to all OS/2 support files
that IBM have released, INCLUDING some files that were never released for WSeB
users. In addition there are several interesting developer links that eCS has
in place as well. I strongly recommend that you consider heading towards eCS if
you want the best OS/2 USB support you can find.

I have been running eCS 1.2MR since January last year AND my USB Camera is
working fine. I was never able to get this working under the USB support I
could find for Warp 4 Fp15.

Now the ...maybe... part...

 GH> Will be going on a 950 with 128mb mem and an Asus A7VI-
 GH> VM Mobo, with onboard video, sound and USB.

eCS will work in 128MB, but one of the enhancements with eCS is that a lot of
the core OS/2 Code is now permanently resident (non-swapable). On Warp 4,
Theseus reported that there was about 20.1MB of resident code, and on eCS 1.2MR
it now reports that there is 80.3MB Resident. Thats 60MB extra memory that just
got chewed up! The affect of this is that the OS is faster (on the same H/W)
than Warp 4, but it needs about 64MB more memory to do this.  If you used Warp
4 with 64MB and that was ok, then eCS on 128MB will be VERY MUCH THE SAME (just
a little faster). However I would seriously suggest you go to at least 256MB of
RAM, given the low cost of RAM these days adn the way applications are using
more memory.

The machine I have been using for about 3 years is a P3 720 with 384MB RAM and
that is fine for me. 

If you used W4 and 64MB and that was bearable, then for a move to eCS I would
say look seriously at going for 256MB, that would at least make the performance
boost noticeable. I would NEVER go less than that though, the latest apps are
definately sucking more memory now. Memory is so cheap now my next machine
(within the next year perhaps) would have 1-2GB as standard, and even if memory
price rose dramatically before then, I would still look at a minimum of 512MB.

With 384MB I rarely use any Swap space, but I do regularly exit and restart
Mozilla after about 5 days of browsing, otherwise it just sucks memory heavy. I
am currently using Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.7, having migrated from Mozilla 1.7.14
in December. SM 1.0.7 is performing very much the same as Moz 1.7.14 was. At
start up with everything loaded (including Mozilla) I have about 180MB RAM
free.

The other thing to watch out for is VIDEO H/W. eCS comes with Scitech SNAP
graphics and it is GOOD!, however it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that you make sure
your Video H/W is supported by SNAP! The bad news is that Scitech are stopping
development for their package and putting it up for sale, however at the moment
it is still very good. There are stories that eCS may look at taking it over
but they are purely just stories at the moment.

Please let us know what you end up with and how it is performing for you.

Cheers...............pk.


--- Maximus/2 3.01
 * Origin: Another Good Point About OS/2 (3:772/1.10)