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Gavin's observations are very astute and echo some of the things I have
been saying for a long time.  If you download and install every program you
find on the Internet or if you install and subsequently de-install
applications, you are going to damage your Windows 95 and Windows NT
workstation.

Windows NT is very good a cleaning up after an application drwatsons.
 However, NT is definitely not impervious to incomplete de-installs and is
indeed wide open to installation replacing existing DLLs with their own.
 Many applications want to be the Administrator of the machine you are
running on, and for a good reason, this is how they circumvent security.

If an application installation procedure forces you to reboot as the last
step, you can be very sure it has just replaced some critical component.  I
expect that from MS service packs and hotfixes.  I expect that from some
extensions provided by the manufacturer of your box.  I expect that when I
install or upgrade a driver.  I do not expect that when I install
applications or games.  MS is notorious for doing this, you have to reboot
after installing Office 97 or IE 3.02 or 4.01.  You also have to reboot
when you install their game Age of Empires.  I was unhappy with that, but
then again it was MS, messing with its own software.  When XYZ software
company does that, I really get nervous.  I want to know why, and what is
going to be replaced.

Our product on Windows NT only exists in its own directory.  We have our
DLLs, and no one else uses them.  We replace nothing and you do not need to
reboot after we have completed the installation.  We also provide a
de-install applet which gets installed when you run the setup.  I wish more
software companies did things that way.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP America, Inc.
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Gavin Scott [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Thursday, April 02, 1998 1:23 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Win NT workstation: How are the emperor's clothes holding up?

This is somewhat off-topic, but...

I remember when NT 4.0 came out how many people claimed it was so much
more stable as a workstation and development platform than Windows 95
was.  Lots of people I respect switched to it and reported vast
improvements.

I switched from 95 to NT over a year ago after Windows 95 melted down
completely on me after getting more and more unstable over time.  NT
was wonderfully stable in comparison.

Now I've been running NT about as long as I had been running Win 95 when
it started becoming unstable, and I'm starting to have all the same sort
of problems on NT that I had on Windows 95.

I'm having to reboot once or twice a day due to the networking system
getting clogged up to the point that no data will transfer anymore,
running FrameMaker results in window controls and display elements being
drawn incorrectly until reboot, etc., etc.

I'm beginning to feel that much of the perceived superiority of NT was due
simply to the fact that upgrading to it forced most people to essentially
do a clean install, which resulted in a clean and stable environment, and
that over time all the assorted software that gets installed onto the
machine (and possibly later incompletely deinstalled) leaves you with the
same kind of flaky patchwork operating system environment as Windows 95,
with all the problems attendant there to.

Certainly NT is much better in many areas than 95, but when it comes down
to whether it is fundamentally more robust and stable when used in a
real-life developer workstation environment, I'm not sure it's really any
better than 95 was.  Install programs still vomit files all over the disk,
happily replacing whatever critical shared DLL files that they feel like,
and none of NT's security or kernel features seem to be used to prevent
applications from doing whatever their developers felt like to your system.

So, I'm interested in whether this is just me or not.  How are other people
finding the reliability of NT as a *workstation* platform over time?

G.