mjg@ecsvax.UUCP (Michael Gingell) (09/15/87)
I have been running Microsoft Word with a Mouse Systems serial mouse for several years using a color and a monochrome monitor with no problems. Recently I bought a Paradise Autoswitch EGA which seems to work fine except that on Word the mouse does not work. Stranger than fiction, another product by Microsoft - Quickbasic recognizes the mouse and works as it should so I don't think its a mouse hardware or software problem. A recent note by someone else on the ATI EGA Wonder card suggested that Word has problems with EGA cards. I am using Word 3.1 and everything else apart from the mouse seems to be OK. This is a typical problem with PC's where you have components from at least 4 different 3rd parties - PCs Ltd AT Computer, Microsoft Word, Mouse Systems Mouse, Paradise EGA Card. Pun intended - It's a Paradise for manufacturers who can all claim it's the other guys fault. HELP - does anyone know ANYTHING which could shed light on this ? --- Mike Gingell ....decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!mjg
wtm@neoucom.UUCP (09/25/87)
The lastest version of "Word" that I have to play with here is ver 3.0. Up though this version, the performance of Word on mixed manufacturer hardware is pretty unpredictable. It is curious that the Michael (the orginal poster) had troubles with the Mouse Systems PC-mouse. So far, that is the only 3rd party mouse driver that I've been able to get to talk to Word. My suggestion is that you ingore the stuff that the MS-Word installation disk says about the mouse driver. Use the driver that came with the PC-mouse instead. One time under circumstances I haven't been able to duplicate, MS-Word said something to the effect of "you must have a Microsoft brand mouse to use this product" when booting up. I think that was with a Summa Graphics mouse. By Microsoft's admission, up to ver 3.0 doesn't support EGA cards very nicely. They fiddle around in the chips directly, rather than using the EGA BIOS. They claim to only support IBM Branded EGA cards. On an AST EGA-plus, Word will occasionally hang the system when the cursor is at the end of a line when justified paragraphs are specified. On an STB EGA Multires, Word turns the entire screen a pathetic lime green-- similar to the Codeview EGA bug. Unfortunately, abberant behavior as above also carries over into Windows, ver 1.03, but not so extrmeme. I wish they'd get their act together and put out a product that doesn't sneak past BIOSes and poke around in dark undocumented corners of their operating system. On the other hand, D-R's GEM is a much more behaved product, seemingly much more conservatively written-- not using undocumented interrupts or bypassing video BIOS. GEM doesn't seem to sufffer from lack of speed by behaving itself. Thus, I think Microsoft can't shield itself from user complaints with charges of equipment incompatiblity and/or claims of the need for sneaky programming to get adequate :-) performance. The :-) re: Windows' performance. To illustrate: GEM and run Windows as a task and return back to GEM when Windows exits. If you run Windows, and then try to run GEM as a task under windows, the system crashes. I haven't been able to cure that by messing with PIF files. (This is really an academic argument, since it would normally be pretty silly to run one window environment as a task in another window environment. That is unless you want a decent paint program for Windows.) I sure hope they do a better job with OS/2 and Presentation Manager! --Bill (wtm@neoucom.UUCP)