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To: K. M. Strickler who wrote (17202)	2/6/1998 9:05:00 PM
From: Justin Banks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Kevin - I see some subtle, but helpful advances, one being the FAT32 allowing for large capacity drives, and small (512Byte) clusters. While this is better than the way it used to be, it's hardly innovative, advanced, or anything but a halfhearted (copied) bag on the side of the original FAT FS. IDE drives still have to pretend they're smaller than they are. I remember when I believed the manf. label on top once, while writing a IDE device driver, and skipped the heads right off the platter. I tend to overlook the MMX channel, since it has been 'out' for a while, but that is really kind of a 'good' enhancement. Only because their FPU wasn't doing anything anyway. Adding media extensions was a good idea, though. AFAIK, it didn't have anything to do with MSFT. I think that as the hardware reaches out, it is harder and harder to make the kind of significant increases that 'we' might be looking for. Naaah, just live on the edge a little! Journaled filesystems, implemented with something like inodes. Get rid of that silly 66Mhz bus. Implement really ansynch. i/o. There's lots that could be done, but much of it would require stepping away from the current cash cow paradigm, so it wouldn't likely happen. Too bad. Interesting idea about the disk i/o. I'll think about it and we'll talk some more later, after I think about how it could be implemented. -justinb

To: K. M. Strickler who wrote (17202)	2/6/1998 9:12:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Uh, Ken, Fat32 came with OSR2. (gratuitous repetition: But the customers don't want it! They want the original retail Win95! It's the best seller!) Though FAT32 is a bit confusing as it's incompatible with NT at this point. The less 16 bit code the better, of course, it's been awhile since there were any 286's out there. MMX channel? No idea what that means. As to disks, well you got various flavors of RAID available at the controller level that are transparent to the OS, as well as some kinds done within NT. These can increase bandwidth without going to specialized disk hardware. Right now, there's a fairly good balance between internal disk throughput and the channel to memory. UDMA has some headroom for increase disk throughput. I don't know, if Windows98 were fast and reliable it'd be worthwhile to me. I'm running NT now, it's more reliable but also noticably sludgier at times. Of course, Win95 would arbitrarily hang from seconds to forever for me, which is the ultimate in sludginess. But 32 meg seems a little small for NT. Then again, Win98 probably can't do anything about the fragile and unprotected FAT file system. Cheers, Dan.