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At 12:07 AM 8/29/96 -0400, Bill Bryan wrote:
>My thanks also to Randy for his detailed review of the 560. I think the
>701c is a super little machine. I have been running win 3.11 and I'm happy
>to say EVERYTHING works. I have been entertaining the thought of switching
>to Win 95. The thought of spending hours getting everything to work again
>is frightening. I was surprised to read that Randy was unable to use his IR
>port under 95. I use mine with a HP 5P laser which has a built-in IR port.
>This combo under Win 3.11 works perfectly and is fairly snappy. I would
>hate to give up this no wires hook-up. I would like to hear from other
>701c/Win 95 users about problems that they have been unable to fix. Perhaps
>through this thread unfixable problems will turn out to be useable features...
No doubt, by now you've looked over my post on the "701 & IR" and
seen that it does indeed work in DOS or a DOS Window under Win 95 with no
problem at all. For that matter, I vaguely remember using it with Procom
Plus & my HP 100LX some months ago and it worked OK (but slowly--so I used a
cable & things went quicker).
My main issue appears to be LapLink for Win 95, I suppose.
By the way, if you do plan to make the jump to Win 95 from Win
3.x--don't worry about it.
First of all, you can install in a seperate directory (to preserve
your Win 3.11 setup) so you need not "destroy" your old windows and you can
boot to your previous version of DOS & run Windows 3.11 quite easily (just
push the F8 key when it says "Windows 95 loading"). Secod
Secondly, Win 95 has 701-native drivers. It runs on the 701 like it
was made specifically to run on it (with the possible exception of the IR
port--but as I said, that's likely a LapLink software problem--Win 95 lists
the port just fine and says everything is working fine with no conflicts!).
Plug & Play & all that jazz.
As a matter of fact, the 701 was my "trainer" machine for loading
up, trying, & evaluating Win 95. After having been burned (IMO) trying new
OS's so early (I never did get along with OS/2, though I desperately wanted
to...tried every version from 1.3 through 2.1 and never was happy with the
results. By the time 3.0 came out, I gave up and decided it wasn't worth
it), I was in NO hurry at all to move to Win 95. I figured everyone else
could do all that late beta testing & I'd upgrade a year later.
I've been very surprised.
I didn't have it on my 701 for long before I took the plunge & put
it on my Desktop too. Its remarkably stable & decent, especially in
comparison to previous Windows incarnations. It even gets a fair amount of
use by my die-hard OS/2-cult-leader brother (some of you "Team OS/2"
followers from way back may remember the name David Whittle), who
reluctantly admits that Win 95 is "Pretty Good".
Should you decide to "take the plunge", I don't think you'll regret
it too much. As I said, if it makes you more comfortable, just install in
its own directory and keep the old Windows on there too (I kept Win 3.1 on
my 701C for months--took it off only a couple weeks ago when I realized I
hadn't used it since that first week or so of having Win 95 on the machine
and I was never going to use it--Win 3.1--again! But you know--you always
want it there "just in case". Back it up to your Zip drive or something
(seems like everyone has a Zip these days)).
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Randy Whittle rwhittle@usa.net
USC Graduate School of Business http://www-scf.usc.edu/~whittle