No Work, No Pay!

A Few Things On My Mind
While we were copying files, I asked a bunch of questions:

• If you copy NT to the hard drive before installation, why does the installer then expand all the files to disk before it copies them again? Jonathan explained that the installer doesn't discriminate between installing from CD-ROM and installing from a hard disk. This may change in the future, but for now you need more than 100MB of free disk space to install this way.
• Why doesn't NT come with a debugger for these kinds of situations? There are too many new computers and motherboards coming out for Microsoft to test every one. More importantly, models are obsolete too quickly to test every one. Every three to six months, PC companies bring out new models or silent revisions to existing ones, or they use entirely different motherboards without changing the system model number. Providing better debugging tools, even if only on request, would cure many cases of Home-Brew Flu and decrease Microsoft's technical support bill. Microsoft is "taking that technology forward," Jonathan said, which could mean anything from "Don't bother me, kid" to "We're having a duel over that with paintball guns."

Of course, the commitment to support for NT cuts both ways. Intel should have tested this motherboard with the NT installer and made whatever changes were necessary to support it. Doubtless, vendors will do this as NT becomes more popular, just as those manufacturers who advertise themselves as "Ready for OS/2" or "SCO OK!" have done.

• Why couldn't we get the Wacom tablet to work on NT? Windows 3.x has direct support for a "secondary pointing device," the exact thing we needed. Under NT, the support is not as explicit. This is important: If NT is to seriously challenge the Mac's dominance of graphics, it must support light pens, bitpads, etc. More accurately, NT needs a way that device manufacturers can directly integrate to the operating system, as Windows 3.x does. Artists need more natural input devices than a mouse for drawing.

More questions came up while David and I were installing.

• Why couldn't we get the highest resolution going under NT? The Diamond Stealth 64 video card certainly supports 1280-by-1024 resolution with 24 bits of color in both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. NT won't let you choose that many colors and that much resolution simultaneously. (Interestingly, Windows 95 won't either, limiting you to 8 bits of color at that resolution, but upon reboot, it runs in 24-bit mode anyway.) Jonathan insisted you need more than 4MB of RAM for that mode, but a little multiplication says you need only 3840KB. A call to Diamond seems in order, and the phrase "fixed in the next release" comes to mind.
• I'd heard that NT on RISC platforms had an Intel CPU emulator, but I hadn't heard any details. Yes, Jonathan said, there's a complete 286 emulator in NT for Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. Any program that runs in Standard Mode under Windows 3.1 will run on those other systems. Obviously, it'll be slower than if you're on a standard office PC running Windows directly, but at least you can run them. And Microsoft is working on a 486 emulator, Jonathan added, so in the future any Windows 3.1 (and by then, probably Windows 95) applications will run.
• What about Microsoft's applications? Will they all move to non-Intel NT platforms? Some have; many won't, at least not anytime soon, Jonathan said. Microsoft's mantra of "Ready for Windows 95" is becoming "Ready for 95 and NT," but even Microsoft isn't following that promise entirely.

The most popular application for Windows--besides Solitaire--is probably Microsoft Office. There's an Office for NT, so you can run Excel 5, Word 6, etc., on any computer that runs NT. But, concurrent with the release of Windows 95 was the new Office 95, containing Word 7, Excel 6, Access, etc., now all renumbered as 95. Jonathan said Microsoft won't move the newest Office to non-Intel NT: There's still a lot of non-portable code in Microsoft Office, stuff that will require a lot of rewriting. I think Microsoft just doesn't see the non-Intel market as large enough for the effort, at least not right now. And, if you like Microsoft Office, there's certainly nothing wrong with Excel 5 and Word 6, except that they're just not the latest versions anymore.

Jonathan also mentioned that there's a fix disk for NT 3.51 available, which is mostly patches for running Office 95 on Intel-based NT.

Success!
All this time, NT had been copying its files and setting itself up. Well, mostly: It never did recognize the Logitech SoundMan audio card. Logitech's bulletin-board system had no NT drivers and we still didn't have the Diamond card running in 1280-by-1024 mode at 24-bit resolution.

More importantly, NT had not migrated the applications from Windows 95. That is, the applications were there on the hard drive, but they weren't listed in the Program Manager. We had to use the migration facility, which is straight out of Windows 3.1 and does nothing about modifying the path or reading the .INI files for applications. Jonathan said that Windows 95's Registry file format is different from NT's, and Microsoft is working on a fix for that, too. For now, if you have a lot of applications already installed, you'll want to migrate to NT from Windows 3.1, not from Windows 95.

At that, we thanked Jonathan and the other Microsoft people for their help and hung up. But I don't find Microsoft's support policy on NT acceptable, and I told them so. Either NT is a desktop operating system with all of the desktop's support needs, or it's a network operating system, where it's more or less OK to refer support to a dealer network. One toll call at no additional charge is not enough technical support for installation, especially when the caller gets no satisfaction. I had to pull rank--tell them I was a Windows NT Magazine columnist--to get a solution. For now, if your business depends on getting NT up and running, I strongly recommend you get supported hardware or a "no work, no pay" invoice from your vendor.