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On Tue, 06 Dec 1994 18:35:03 +0100 you wrote:
> Jesse, aside from this video problem, can you comment on your experiences
> with Chicago on the ThinkPad? Especially interested in PCMCIA device
> compatibility, resolution on external monitors, and installation medium
> (network CD? big stack of floppies?).
Okay, here's the scoop (or at least from my experience).
Overall, I'm quite pleased. There are still bugs, but for my work it's
more reliable than win3.1, so I'm glad to have it. If you can get hold of
it, and are using windows 3.1 now, you'll probably be glad you did. If
you're using os/2, you probably won't be impressed.
I have 12 megs, and it's pretty smooth, but I'm considering taking the
plunge on one of those weird 32meg thingies. Even though the memory
management seems pretty decent, I end up loading up a lot of stuff,
often including photoshop (big hog).
MOUSE -
I tried for a while with the internal mouse driver, but there must be
a bug in it, my mouse was going painfully slow (and with a trackpoint,
that's real pain) and the speed settings didn't effect it. I stumbled on
the solution of loading the dos mouse.com, and it zips along fine now,
with the only downside being that when the system is loaded, the mouse
slows down and gets a bit jerky.
PCMCIA -
I only use one, a MHZ xjack, and it was a bit of a hassle. I first
installed chicago over my existing dos/windows setup, and it kept all
the drivers intact. Eventually I had to remove the drivers manually
and reinstall, then go into the new "add new equip" control panel and
add the generic pcmcia manager, and it works just fine now.
There are other tp'ers in the beta, and I've heard that network cards
are working too.
Monitors -
I have a 755cs, and I haven't tried driving an external at higher res,
but there is a hardware profile setting, just for that purpose. You
can create a hardware profile for a standalone or a docked setup, and
switch between them. I'll try it later and report.
Installation -
not too bad, I don't have a scsi card (I'll take this moment to grumble
at that, I think it ought to be built in) but I do have a parallel port
tape drive for my thinkpad, so I copied the 20 meg of installation dir
from the cd to a tape and then restored it to my thinkpad.
This solution ended up being pretty nice, since I ended up reinstalling
a few times, and could do it straight from my harddrive without any fuss.
I did have a nasty time of the actual install, had to play with disabling
and enabling drivers. Now that it's up and running, I am working pretty
problem-free.
--
____________________________________________________________________________
jesse montrose jesse@spine.com jesse@xaostools.com jesse@hooked.net
i don't recycle. i'm a consumer, damn it, i consume.