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

To: wily who wrote (23268)	4/21/1999 10:03:00 AM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Allow me to interject a possible explanation-- Windows 98 contains Internet Explorer as a part of the operating system. They integrated it in such a way that when it is run, it can stay resident in memory-- the term I saw used was "part of the working set." That leaves less memory for other programs, requiring more accesses to the swap memory on the hard drive. If you don't have a lot of RAM, it could be a problem. I got this information from the DOJ exhibits, by the way. In the exhibit, this email-writer talked about the competitive advantage gained by keeping IE in memory. Keeping IE in memory would slow down the use of Netscape compared to Internet Explorer (Netscape would be slower because two browsers would be in memory at the same time). Of course, the writer-and possibly Microsoft- didn't consider the possibility that everything else would slow down as well. I don't have time to go find the original reference, but if you're willing to wade through them (they're very enlightening), you can find it.

To: wily who wrote (23268)	4/21/1999 4:29:00 PM
From: XiaoYao	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

I found Win98 runs much faster than original Win95 and relatively similar to Win95 OSR2. You don't need to set folder options for every folder. Goto "Tools->Folder Option", select "View" tab, there is a button called "Like current folder". You can set a folder view to your prefer then click this button. It will set all folders using your current folder view.

To: wily who wrote (23268)	4/21/1999 6:39:00 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Why is Win98 slower than win95? I remember a MSFT win98 developer remarking something to the effect that, "we keep trying for performance gains but the added features always wipe those out, so as hardware increases in capability, the OS never gets any faster." That's certainly something I would agree with. To be honest, I think it would be different for every machine. Generally, I don't put win98 on older machines (they don't need it), but from the perspective of drivers it's nice to have win98 on brand new machines. Win98 loads the busmastering patch while under win95 it usually has to be loaded manually from the motherboard CD. I didn't think at the time that they should have shipped win98, but if you can take advantage of customers who don't really care one way or the other; well that has proven to work quite nicely for MSFT. I'm guessing this upcoming win99 upgrade won't have any compelling features or performance increases. It's kind of funny that I should see this question from you about performance. I was just re-applying to become a contractor at MSFT on the win99 performance testing team. They rejected me on the basis of my past record of leaving the company suddenly, without notice. At least the rumors of vandalism and theft never made it into my record (those were never true, by the way). <ng> I wonder if any of the management of the old "personal systems" team - since spread throughout the company - reads SI? I think that MSFT and its shareholders are in for a rude awakening when they realize how commoditized the OS and app code is about to become. FWIW Andy (legend in my own mind)

To: wily who wrote (23268)	4/26/1999 8:09:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

wily - I had exactly the same experience when going from Win95 OSR2 to Win98 - and repeated the degradation in performance on 3 different machines, 2 desktops and a laptop. All of these had at least 64MB RAM and one had 128MB. All were 200MHz or better processors and had good graphics cards - an ATI in one, Matrox Millennium in the others. The symptoms I saw included very slow window refresh, very slow background graphics refresh, windows which took 10 seconds to close when minimized, slow program load times, and poor network performance. I took steps to disable IE4 but that did not improve matters substantially. Rather than spend a lot more time on performance tuning I gave up after about 8 hours and reloaded Win95.