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Jim is essentially correct here. The fundamental issues are pre-emptive
multitasking vs cooperative multitasking.
Windows 3.1 relies on cooperative multitasking. It depends on other
applications to relinquish control of the CPU in order to run itself and
other applications. Also, Windows 3.1 is not much more than a shell on top
of DOS. It has very, very little overhead compared to 95 or NT. Remember,
Win3.1 would run on a machine with 640K of RAM or less. Because it relied
on other apps to be good neighbors and not keep the CPU too long, you are at
the mercy of the other applications on the system. Unfortunately, if an
application takes a long time to load, TS4 will be locked up for this time.
Aside from some of the already mentioned limitations, the 2 biggest
limitations in Win3.1 are memory and OS protection. The largest block of
memory you can allocate with Win3.1 is 64K. This in turn leads to the
resource limitation which limits the number of applications you can run and
the amount of certain types of memory they can run. The 64K limitation is
also the reason for the 13,000 bar limit in TS4 and the reason why systems
run out of memory. The OS protection issue is not always a problem if you
are running stable applications. If you are running unstable applications
however, any one of them can crash the entire operating system.
Win95/98 on the other hand uses pre-emptive multitasking which means the OS
can interrupt any application, anytime. It interrupts applications several
times per second to allow other applications to run. (Un)fortunately, when
Microsoft wrote 95, they went to extremes in order to be compatible with the
large base of Win3.1 software that was already out there. One of the worst
side effects of this effort was that 95 uses a resource allocation scheme
that is very similar to Win3.1 which is why Win95 users have to buy products
like MemTurbo and the like to overcome slowdown and resource limitation
issues. Win95 also uses a lot of the code that Win3.1 uses and it has a
similar lack of protection for the OS internals which means that errant apps
can crash it with little more difficulty. Microsoft was forced into this
compatibility decision because IBM was making a very serious effort at the
time to get OS/2 v2 going in the marketplace and Microsoft thought
abandoning it's large W3.1 base was a bad move. Like most engineering
projects that get wagged by marketing, the result is less than a technical
marvel. I view Win95/98 as nearly a crime against consumers. Microsoft
should abandon all improvements to this line and shift the resources to
migrating consumers to the NT/2K line. I have never installed 95/98 on a
system for anything other than compatibility testing and I never, never
will. Win95/98 has about 50% of the CPU drag and 70% of the memory
requirements of NT and provides almost none of the stability and doesn't
eliminate the resource problem.
Window NT was written from scratch to be a real 32-bit, fully pre-emptive
multitasking operating system. The project was headed up by Dave Cutler,
the guy who headed up Digital's VMS operating system development. I've
never used VMS, but 2 programmers I've met who have worked with it say it
was the best operating system they've ever used. NT was originally going to
be IBM's OS/2 3.0 but Microsoft and IBM had their split in the early 90's
and that was that. There is a great book called Show Stopper (which I
haven't read) that details the 5-year struggle of passionate and talented
developers working long hours and under incredible stress to get NT out the
door. I first started using NT when it was in late beta. Prior to that I
had been developing Win3.1 and DOS software. When you develop on those
platforms, you get used to rebooting your computer literally 5-10 times an
hour. That is not an exageration. The only upside is that DOS boots quick.
When I started working under NT, it was like night and day. Suddenly, my
computer stayed up all day long and only the software I was developing
crashed. It pure heaven. NT adds a little more CPU overhead than Win95/98
and requires a little more memory. And I think a lot of people get the
impression that NT is a lot more complicated to use the Windows 95. It
isn't. The interface still has push buttons and check boxes. TradeStation
looks the same. Just don't install the WebDesktop and you're fine. And W2K
is even more stable than NT. I have installed W2K on about 4 machines and
on 2 of those it told me it was missing a driver on installation, but it
still managed to install a working driver and I haven't had to mess with
those machines again. I can't install W2K on my primary development system
for compatibility reasons but I'm going to upgrade as soon as possible and
I'm leaving NT4 on my TS4 system because I generally take the
if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it approach.
For those of you who are having memory problems and considering installing
something like MemTurbo, do yourself a favor and solve your problems once
and for all: install W2K. It's a real operating system. The interface is
nearly identical to 95/98. You might have to add some memory to your system
but memory isn't that expensive compared to all the time you have to spend
futzing around klunky software. It's bad enough that you have to use some
version of TradeStation.
Kent
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Osborn <jimo@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, July 20, 2000 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: TS4 and Windows 3.1?
"Cash" <cashc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>We all know that the higher version of Windows you get, the more overhead
>you have.
>
>So, I was wondering if you only wanted to run TS4 on a power-house
>machine (800mhz+) and had Win3.1 as your operating system, would that be
>a faster, less problematic solution than Win95,98,2000?
>
>Has anyone investigated this?
When I asked this question of a Microsoft software engineer, he replied
that it depended mainly on how many tasks you were asking your computer
to do. If, like me, TS4 is your only application, so that Windows is
nothing but a wrapper for that application, then Win3.1 is the choice.
Mine does just fine collecting the CME from BMI satellite with a T-port
on a 486-66 machine with 32Meg of ram. Others have mentioned the
name-length limitations of Win3.1, but I doubt that that's a problem
with TS4. If you're trying to deal with thousands of stocks or
something else fancy, you might run into memory-handling limitations
in Win3.1; I don't know what those limitations are, but I suspect
there are some.
If you need to run lots of applications at the same time as TS, you're
better off with Win95/98/2000. I've been advised that Win95 has much
less overhead than any of the other 32-bit choices, and would be the
only thing possible on my 486, should I want to "upgrade" say, for
networking purposes (I don't anticipate adding any other apps to that
machine).
Jim
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