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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (16192)	1/17/1998 10:21:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Fixing Windows OSR2 bugs (or are they features?) infoworld.com This is an interesting little column from that den of ilkiquity, infoworld. It's mostly technical, but it has some relevance to "standard Microsoft business practice", aka the games Bill plays. Windows 95B (also known as OEM Service Release 2, or OSR2) remains an anomaly among Windows versions. Windows 95B is arguably the latest flavor of Windows 95, with several minor bug fixes and device drivers. But Win95B/OSR2 is strangely hard to get. You must buy it from OEMs at the same time that they sell you a complete system, or at least a motherboard or hard drive. This was originally explained in my columns of Nov. 17, 1997, and Nov. 24, 1997. (See "Drag and drop Net files with FTP tool," and "More Explorer 4.0 bugs affect images, text, and font files.") Of course this also speaks to the bizzare contretemps about the retail Win95 release that the OEM's won't touch with a 10 foot poll, but which is plenty good for the sucker "consumer". It's the best seller! But I digress. Win95B is somewhat more stable than earlier releases of Win95, and the improved device support is handy. But Win95B also includes a few maddening bugs. Notable among these is OSR2's incapability to dual boot between Win95B and an older version of DOS. You also cannot run Windows 3.x in DOS mode using Win95B. Both of these shortcomings are inconvenient for people who need to test programs in both environments (or who simply need to run an old program with its preferred OS). These two failings of Win95B are all the more galling because they aren't really accidental bugs. They are bugs that were deliberately introduced into Win95B as "features" to interfere with your use of older software. There should be a word for bugs that are willfully created as features. Perhaps they are "fugs." In any case, creative programmers around the world have taken up the challenge and fixed both of these failings. Fixing the missing dual-boot feature of Win95B is a simple matter of a change to a 400-byte boot program. This program resides in the first physical sector of your hard drive and controls the boot-up sequence. But of course, it's all beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, i.e. anyone outside the inner sanctum in Redmond. The complete article goes into how to fix this, with free code from some guy in Germany. Hope he's out of reach of the legal eagles. Cheers, Dan.