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Tim Tyhurst wrote: > > > Tim Tyhurst wrote: > > > > > > > I've upgraded the OS on my ThinkPad 360PE to Win95 now, and have > > > > everything working, including Pen Services 2.0. (Boy, I kind of like > > > > the old pen services better...kind of miss the gestures and so forth). > > > > > > I'd be interested in hearing of any success you have in running with 256 > > > colour drivers and Pen Services 2.0. My experience with my 750P are > > > > Are you teasing me? Your experience with your 750P are WHAAAT? :) > > Oops, sorry about that -- deleted one line too many. Anyway, what I > meant to say was, "My experiences with my 750P are virtually identical > to what you have reported." I know that some of the 750P and 360PE drivers are interchangable. The unit I purchased (used of course) was using the 750P audio drivers. > > Well, as I said, I have everything working. I've just finished spending > > a couple MORE hours trying to find native Win95 drivers for the WD90C24 > > chipset (video). This notebook has 1MB RAM, so it shouldn't have any > > problems showing 256 colors, but the native Win95 drivers only work > > correctly in 16 color mode. You have to load an external driver called > > VESA.EXE (which you can get from Western Digital and ibm.com and > > probably other places). VESA.EXE is a DOS TSR, so it's a 16-bit thunk > > and is s-l-o-w! > > I haven't researched this, but I was under the impression that the VESA > TSR just provides some extensions so that the WD driver knows how to > set up the video mode. I don't think it's actually used by the driver > after initialization. In any case, I used it for a couple of years on > a 360Cs and found the 256 colour performance to be perfectly adequate. You could be correct about VESA. From what I could tell (from what it sounded like on the old Paradise site) is that the notebook versions of the Western Digital WD90C24 chip (and similar models) does not have VESA in BIOS as they do in desktop computers. So I was thinking it was a plug-in BIOS code of some kind. What is happening with that bios code is anybody's guess. > My guess was that it's the pen extensions (in particular the inking code) > that is the problem. I presume it's optimized for the VGA 4bbp palette, > since that would be the most common. Not many Pen devices support 8 bit > colour. You think it could be the pen drivers, huh? That occurred to me when I first started noticing the speed problem. There's clearly a lot more "crud" with pen 2.0 than in 1.0 and it could very well be a dog. But the pen speed is perfectly acceptable in 16-color mode which is why I lean towards suspecting video. And the palette? Your guess is as good as mine :) > > Only problem is, all of this really dates the system! I'll bet you can > > run Win98 just fine on the 360 and probably 750 if you're willing to > > give up the pen, but that's the whole point! :) > > I actually tried Beta 1 on my 750P. It ran, although it was pretty slow. > (This is with 36 megs of memory, too). I think that the quoted minimum > for Win98 is going to be a 486 DX2/66, though. VERY interesting. Did you have the pen services working too? I wonder if Windows 95 drivers are going to be compatible with Win98? I guess that as long as Win32 doesn't change it doesn't REALLY matter if I have Win98 or not. I do want to be able to run 32-bit software, but don't care if it's the latest OS or not. Oh, and as my TP only has 12 MB and tops out at 20, if yours was slow with 36MB (wow!) then I bettery shy away from it. I also just tried installing the old Win31 video drivers (that's pretty ugly and would involve the same thunking, but I thought maybe it would speed things up a bit). Still required VESA.EXE. Sigh... Oh, and one other thing. Have you tried installing Pen Services 1.0 on Win95? (smile). I really liked it better! Might not be quite as intuitive at first, but once you learned the gestures it worked well and got out of your way. The whole pen thing is kind of interesting. I would have never even bothered with it had I not ran across an old Grid 2050 and played around with it for a while. I didn't think I'd like the pen, but it turns out to be a nice additional component (I still like having the keyboard). Having discovered this, it seems to me that the pen wasn't marketed well enough on the pc. I think everybody would find it useful for certain tasks. Thanks for all your feeback...