mrh@camcon.co.uk (Mark Hughes) (07/31/89)
This is a summary of replies to the following posting of about ten days ago. Many thanks to those who replied, in particular to Larry Hastings who took a lot of trouble to provide a structured critique of both products. <Please mail me with any comments you have on likes/dislikes/problems of < < Quarterdeck's DesqView 386 <and IGC's VM/386 < <Comparative information is of particular interest. I received only four replies, but they have enabled me to decide on DesqView 386 (DV) for my own purposes, although VM/386 (VM) is not to be ruled out. The replies were:- 1 from a very pleased VM user with no direct experience of DV. 1 from an equally pleased DV user with no experience of VM. 1 from an extremely dissatisfied (ex) DV user. 1 from LH above with experience of VM in beta test form, and who is currently an enthusiastic user of DV. There was one very positive comment about support from IGC (VM/386) and one very negative comment about support from Quarterdeck (DesqView 386). The dissatisfied (ex) DV user had a lot of installation problems, failed to get DV to work with his Logitech hi-res bus mouse, and got no help from Quarterdeck. Remember that this is only a summary. If you are seriously trying to decide between these products maybe you ought to read the postings in full. Send me your email address if you want a copy. Differences between DesqView 386 and VM/386 ------------------------------------------- DesqView 386 is really just ordinary DV with an extra program, QEMM, which allows DV to treat exTENded memory as exPANded memory. (DV only understands the latter.) As such DV swaps programs between the DOS RAM partition and higher memory, rather than creating virtual machines. VM understands 386 exTENded memory and makes use of it to create virtual machine's. Hence these two programs use fundamentally different approaches to achieve the same basic end: Multiple copies of DOS and DOS based programs running concurrently on a single PC (single user). DV's approach has the disadvantage of using more memory than VM, (amount disputed: 50k to 114k) but has the advantage that all hardware devices are available to all DV tasks. VM will use less memory, but with some exceptions (keyboard, screen, disk drives and possibly printer) hardware devices are available to only one virtual machine at a time. Hardware devices such as COM1 (etc) are allocated to a specific virtual machine at start up, and must be manually re-allocated if you want access to them from a (program running on a) different virtual machine. Apparently the beta test version of VM had an "abominable disk-access overhead" compared to DV. This may well have been improved. DV allows tasks to "co-exist" within windows on a single screen, or to have their own full screen. VM provides only the latter. DV allows you to control how much processor time (how many slices per second) is allocated to the foreground task and how much to any background tasks. VM allows greater control enabling you to control the fineness of the time slicing and to adjust how many slices each program receives per second individually. Summary ends. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of any information in this posting and report it with minimal interpretation in good faith. If any feature mentioned is important to your purchase decision, check it out yourself directly with the relevant manufacturer. I'd still be interested to hear comments on the comments by the way, so if I've made an error or you know something important that I haven't mentioned let's hear about it - don't mail me this time though, please post a follow up. ------------------- <mrh@camcon.co.uk> or <...!mcvax!ukc!idec!camcon!mrh> | Mark Hughes | Tel: +44 (0) 223 420024 Cambridge Consultants Ltd. |(Compware . CCL) | Tlx: 931 211 0193 (KZ G) The Science Park, Milton Road, ------------------- BT Gold: 72:MAG70076 Cambridge UK. (Own opinions etc.) -- ------------------- <mrh@camcon.co.uk> or <...!mcvax!ukc!idec!camcon!mrh> | Mark Hughes | Tel: +44 (0) 223 420024 Cambridge Consultants Ltd. |(Compware . CCL) | Tlx: 931 211 0193 (KZ G) The Science Park, Milton Road, ------------------- BT Gold: 72:MAG70076 Cambridge UK. (Own opinions etc.)
russ@prism.gatech.EDU (Russell Shackelford) (08/02/89)
>In article <3425@titan.camcon.co.uk>, mrh@camcon.co.uk (Mark Hughes) writes: [stuff deleted about the responses to query about Desqview386 & VM/386] > The dissatisfied (ex) DV user had a lot of installation problems, failed to > get DV to work with his Logitech hi-res bus mouse, and got no help from I have no experience with Desqview support people, mainly because I found that for me it worked just fine as soon as I fiddled with it as per instructions in the manual. The manual's ok, not great, but ok. I imagine that some people (maybe NOT the one who reported problems) are just acclimated to software that just loads and works with no fiddling. I thought that the required fiddling was relatively straighforward and not too complicated. As for the problem with the Logitech hi-res bus mouse, I've got one and have had no difficulty of any kind using it with DV. I used one of the QEMM programs to load mouse.com in hi memory, and I find myself with MORE of the 640 RAM available than the manual sez I should! (575K). I like it just fine. Just wish they could squeeze MORE of their stuff up high to leave MORE of the 640 available. Actually, the only place I need it is with Ventura, so I suppose that I should wish for better memory management from THOSE folks. -- Russell Shackelford School of Information and Computer Science Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332 russ@prism.gatech.edu (404) 834-4759
mitsu@well.UUCP (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) (08/03/89)
I'll have to echo the sentiment that Quarterdeck technical support leave much to be desired: it is barely adequate, but they tend to be both discourteous and somewhat incompetent. However, that in itself isn't enough to stop me from using it (QEMM is what I'm using with Windows/286, a nice combo for some applications, as I've mentioned in another posting.)
wek@point.UUCP (Bill Kuykendall) (08/04/89)
>There was one very positive comment about support from IGC (VM/386) and one >very negative comment about support from Quarterdeck (DesqView 386). Desqview is wonderful. Their tech support people are not bad either -- *if* you can get to one. Whoever set up their phone system should be drawn and quartered. You can spend a whole day (at your own expense) being recirculated through their "press '1' to..." garbage.