LOWER sales than expected, but a smaller support headache. Some gains in productivity and some excellent new features, but others that do not live up to expectations. Windows 95 has been a mixed bag for Microsoft, its customers and the industry overall, compared with previous versions (Windows 3.x).
Companies have not taken to Win 95 on the scale expected a year ago. Many do not fancy the need to upgrade lots of PCs to get it running and retrain users when they expect to be running Windows NT on the desktop in a year or two anyway. Personal and home users often don't have the choice - Windows 95 has been pre-loaded on most machines aimed at these markets for the past year.
. For: Multitasking
The way Win 3. x allowed several programs to run at the same time has been compared to the way an elephant cycles. The point being that what is notable is not that it does it badly, it is that it does it at all.
With Win 95 (at least with programs written specifically for it), everything is much more graceful. Less elephants on bicycles than a decent set dancing team.
Riverdance we're still waiting for, but it is possible to have useful things going on in more than one program at a time, with few conflicts between them.
. Against: Speed
After a lot of finger tapping, whistling and staring at the ceiling while waiting for a PC to do something, it is now possible to formulate Fiachra's Law: one second waiting for a computer is equal in frustration to five minutes waiting for a bus, or a parking space, or a supermarket checkout.
Starting a 486 that loads a virus checker and a couple of other programs on boot up can mean a three minute wait, or more. One of the penalties Win 95 pays for its sophistication (except on very high specification PCs) is speed. . For: Networking
Getting your PC to get along with several others is much easier under Win 95. The awful tweaking and retweaking Win 3.x needed to get Windows for Workgroups networking to run without breaking the Novell and the TCP/IP already parlously coexisting is a thing of the past.
Win 95 lets us stack one protocol or service on top of another with minimal complaining. Given a fast machine to begin with, the performance penalty of multiprotocol networking is hardly noticeable.
. Against: Hardware demands
Related to the point on speed above is the need for a fast PC, plenty of memory and a large hard disk to run Win 95 comfortably. The sensible minimum of a Pentium 100, 16 Mb of RAM and a gigabyte of hard disk space is far more than we were promised a year ago.
. For: Prettier
Remember how exciting Windows 3.x looked the first time you clapped eyes on it? And how dreary those icons were two years later? Win 95 started out looking better and add ons like the Plus! pack made it much easier to give a PC a personal look and feel. The interface is not just more attractive, it's easier to use, and full of small shortcuts that make working with it more productive.
. Against: Mystery
A prettier, more usable interface, greater sophistication and more automation of routine tasks carries a price tag other than performance. Just like the Macintosh, when something goes wrong it can be very difficult to track down. Part way through writing this article the office Pentium 50 died, claiming "non system disk or disk error" for drive C.
Win 95 had to be reinstalled. Regularly, less dramatic crashes shut down the word processor or the Web browser with a fatal error.
. For: Plug and Play
Like the little girl in the nursery rhyme, when it is good it is very, very good to be able to add a new bit to a PC and let the computer look after installing it. (And, like her, when it is bad it is horrid.)
But it was always horrid, or semi horrid under DOS and Win 3 and it works more often than not, so Plug and Play is a big plus for Win 95. Instead of hawking through jumper settings, IRQs, base addresses and all the other unlovely innards of an operating system, it is glorious to add the bit then let Win 95 find identify and incorporate the newcomer.
. For and against: Long filenames
It is certainly much better to be able to name a file My special file than something like MYSPCLFL.doc. However, because of backward compatibility, the actual filename, seen in an older program or in a DOS window, ends up as something like MYSPE 1.doc possibly worse than its old style equivalent.
. Against: DOS inside
Win 95 does a good job of hiding it, but lurking behind the icons and the interface is the Quasimodo of 1980s computing:
MS-DOS. It pops up its ugly head from time to time, usually as the explanation for an infelicitous feature of Win 95 like the long/short filenames.
. For: Tools
Even if some useful Win 3.x utilities were dropped or downgraded in Win 95, they were made up for with other goodies. Among them are the fastformat utility for diskettes, the file viewer that shows the contents of graphics, word processor and other files without having to open them in the original program, and nifty utilities such as Traceroute, which lists all the hosts between the Win 95 machine and a remote target when using the Internet.
One sophisticated new tool is Exchange, bringing office email, Internet mail and fax into one filing system and free add on, however, is Internet Explorer (see story below), a Web browser to rival Netscape's Navigator.
. Against: Irritations
Dozens of small quirks of the new operating system take from it. The need to click "refresh" to update the listing of files on a floppy is one. Another is when the "autoplay" feature for CDRoms takes on a mind of its own and tries to reinstall a program every time the disk is put in the drive. Or being told to log in again to a Novell server on the local area network after making a dial up connection to the Internet. (The latter can, no doubt be fixed by anyone willing to spend enough time fiddling but who has that sort of time to spare?)
On balance, Windows 95 has been worthwhile. The primary benefits of smooth multitasking, easy networking and much improved help screens with "wizard" macros to help with new tasks outweigh the failings. Many of the failings were present, and often worse, in Windows 3.x, but the whole point was to get away from them.
In the end, people use their computers in so many different ways (well, they are personal computers) that the profit and loss tally on the new operating system will be different for each user. So how was it for you?