New OS/2 Is Cheap, Choosy, Complex

IBM Corp. is offering a special version of its powerful multi-tasking operating system, OS/2 2.1, at a bargain price of $49 to computer users who already have DOS and Windows.

The question is, will it make your life in front of the computer easier or harder? The answer is not simple.

This latest, cheapest version of OS/2 bears the somewhat misleading name of OS/2 for Windows, leading some to believe that it is a special kind of OS/2 that runs under Windows.

It is, in fact, standard OS/2 2.1 but without IBM’s emulation of Windows 3.1. It does not run under Windows. You can run Windows programs under OS/2, but to do so with this version you must already have Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 installed when you install OS/2 for Windows.

You’ll also need the original diskettes from which Windows was installed on your computer, because several Windows files must be read from those diskettes during the OS/2 installation. (Computers sold with Windows pre-loaded on the hard disk usually come with original diskettes for the software or a special utility program that will copy the pre-installed programs to diskettes.)

This new release of OS/2 2.1 benefits from about a year of debugging the original release of version 2.1. In addition, it includes Multimedia Presentation Manager/2 with excellent sound, graphics and digital video capabilities compatible with most popular hardware systems.

But I couldn’t find any performance advantage using OS/2 for Windows compared to the regular version of OS/2 2.1. In fact, Microsoft’s Windows ran slightly slower than IBM’s Win OS/2 emulation of Windows in the standard release of OS/2 2.1. In both cases, Windows programs run slower than under Windows on a DOS computer. However, DOS programs usually run as well or better under OS/2 than they do in DOS.

I compared Windows program speed by running a macro in a Microsoft Excel 4.0 spreadsheet that took nearly three minutes to complete its task. On the average, compared to Windows under DOS, the macro ran 11% slower under OS/2 for Windows. When I ran it in the regular edition of OS/2 2.1, the macro was 8% slower than Windows under DOS. All the tests were on the same 486, 50-megahertz computer using identical hard drives.

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There is much to admire about OS/2 and, in fact, it has been praised in nearly every review in the computer trade press. But it is not for casual computer users and definitely not for novices.

It is a multi-tasking operating system, and if you don’t need to run two or more programs simultaneously, especially DOS programs or a combination of DOS and Windows programs, there is little reason to move to OS/2. Despite IBM’s claims of ease of use, it is complicated and takes about 30 megabytes of disk storage that you could use other ways.

There isn’t much general-use office software specifically for OS/2, and that isn’t likely to change, since most publishers are concentrating on Windows programs. Despite that, some companies have made excellent use of OS/2 to run specially designed software tailored to their particular needs.

If you are the kind of user who constantly runs up against the memory constraints of DOS and Windows, and you are comfortable dealing with the technical aspects of computer software, then OS/2 may offer significant advantages. For instance, I found that a mapping program that demands the full attention of my DOS and Windows computer ran just fine under an OS/2 window, allowing me to instantly switch back and forth among other programs. I also had no trouble switching back and forth between a memory-gobbling game--Flight Simulator 5.0--and other applications.

Of course, if you’re a programmer or just truly adventurous, OS/2 is a delight because it lets you tailor the way the computer allocates memory and other resources to each program you want to run in as much detail as you could possibly desire.

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The price for such flexibility is complication.

I installed OS/2 for Windows on one of IBM’s premier laptop computers, the ThinkPad 720C. It took about an hour and 15 minutes, because at the end of the 15th and last disk to be copied, the installation program froze up. I had to start over, but the second time things worked fine.

However, after it was loaded, OS/2 would not work with my IBM modem. An IBM technician faxed me a set of instructions to solve the problem. There was a mistake in those instructions, but they got me close enough that I could solve the remaining error on my own.

The cause of the modem problem illustrates how finicky OS/2 is. OS/2 has a start-up file called CONFIG.SYS (just like in DOS, only much more complicated) that contains about 90 lines of instructions telling the computer how to behave when it starts. I had to rearrange the order in which 10 of those lines appear in order to get the modem to work.

The few programs I tested ran fine, but the OS/2 manual lists about 20 pages of popular DOS and Windows programs for which special tweaking is needed in OS/2 to get them to run. There is also a page listing programs that won’t run in OS/2 at all.

There are plenty of compatibility problems in the world of DOS and Windows too, but at least software publishers usually can be counted on to fix those problems. You cannot rely on them to also make sure their programs are OS/2-compatible.