battle@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Rick) (05/24/89)
Imagine you have been promoted to the position of Workstation Administrator by your organization. You are expected to bring your considerable technical skills to bare on several problems experienced by the thousands of workstations (PC's) in your organization. For the purpose of this discussion PC's are 286 or 386 IBM compatible machines. Here is one of the problems. A Chief Administrator or Dean is stuck on Windows 286 or Windows 386. He says buy the prouduct. You have to decide the following; 1. What compatibility exists between Windows and Presentation Manager? In other words, if you buy Windows now and OS/2 takes off two or three years from now will you have to trash your investment in Windows and be demoted back to your present position, give up your free parking and secretary. 2. Windows 286 does no multitasking, DESQview does. What arguement do you make in favor of a non-Windows product? You may include Omniview if you like or any other product. But remember, you have to convince NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE WHO MAKE THE ULITMATE DECISION!!! 3. Windows 386 does the virtual 8086 mode. What TSR problems exist? Are they worth the hassle? What do you tell the big cheese? 4. Beyond buying Mac II's for everybody, what other alternatives are there? Although this may sound like a ton BS to most of you, they are real questions being asked by "the big cheeses" everywhere who read the crap in the trade rags and don't want to hear bits and bytes arguements. How many times have you seen eyes glaze over when you were trying to explain something important to a non-techincal type? Anyhow if you have any interest, let the brainstroming fly and if the content is worth repeating it will be brought before netland for further review. Have a good holiday and remember next week is, worst case, a four day week! Cheers...
rogerson@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM (Dale Rogerson) (05/26/89)
If the programs you want to run happen to be Window's applications, like Excel, Pagemaker, etc, then Windows is better than any of the other environments. However, I would not recommend Windows if your main functions are programming, or working with large DOS only programs. It also depends on the knowledge of the users running the system. DESQview is better for running DOS applications, but it can be a pain to get things working the first time with your application. -----Dale Rogerson-----
mms00786@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (05/31/89)
Windows does do multitasking. It simply doesn't do pre-emptive multitasking. Milan mms00786@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu