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OEM Service Release 2: Hard To Get, But Worth
Having
With Windows 95 out for just over a year, Microsoft quietly introduced a new version of Windows last fall
that has generated a lot of attention. They call it OEM Service
Release 2, or OSR2 for short, but so many things have been improved that
Microsoft could have as easily called it Windows '96 it's as big a
leap in its own way as Windows 3.1 was over 3.0 five years ago.
The Upgrade Debate The first thing to note on
OSR2 is that it's only available if you buy a new computer, or at least a
new motherboard, and support is provided only by the seller, not
Microsoft. That's why we're giving it only 3 stars – it's not
available as either an upgrade or as a full version for sale by itself,
and the CD-ROM has been coded so that OSR2 can't be set up on a system
that already has Windows installed. That said, there are ways to
install OSR2 as an upgrade, and if you're buying a new motherboard
or if you get a new system, and want to move the contents of your old hard
disk en masse rather than reinstall all your software upgrading to
OSR2 isn't a bad idea. Microsoft says that OSR2 hasn't
been tested on the same range of existing systems that the original
Windows 95 was, and since they had 50,000 beta test sites that time
they're probably right. That's part of why this new version is being
distributed only to PC manufacturers, since manufacturers can test it on
each model and iron out any kinks. OSR2 is, however, designed to run
on any computer that's suitable for Windows 95. If you
can't get OSR2, you can still download many of its features from
Microsoft's Web site.
The New Features While OEM Service Release 2 is
still Windows 95 at its core, it does include many of the new goodies that
Microsoft started developing as soon as Windows 95 itself was
complete. FAT32: This is the biggest
improvement that OSR2 makes, and one of those you can't get any other
way. Since the introduction of MS-DOS 3.31 on a few makes of PCs in
1987, DOS has allowed up to 65,536 clusters (represented by a 16-bit
number, so this was called FAT16) in a hard disk partition. As hard
disks got larger the size of each cluster got larger, causing a great deal
of waste of space because any file had to use a whole number of clusters;
if your clusters are 16K each, even a one-byte file will take 16K on your
drive and a 17K file will take 32K. Because of this many people have
created more than one partition on their drives, putting up with the
aggravation of multiple drive letters to get smaller cluster sizes.
FAT16 also limits each partition to two gigabytes, so with today's larger
drives you have to use two partitions anyway. FAT32, as
the name implies, expands the limit to over four million clusters -- the
limit that can be represented by a 32-bit number. With this setup
you can have a partition as large as eight gigabytes and still have
clusters of only 4K. The partition size limit is now two terabytes
-- 2048 gigabytes! The only drawback to FAT32 is that such
a partition can only be read by OSR2 (or the DOS core that comes with it)
and disk utilities that either do everything through DOS or Windows calls
or are rewritten to work with FAT32. Among other things, earlier
versions of Norton Utilities can't handle FAT32 (though the latest Windows
95 version can); neither can Microsoft's own Interlink Server
(INTERSVR.EXE), though Interlink can still be used to allow a new system
with FAT32 to access the drives of an older system that doesn't. A
FAT32 partition presently can't be read by any competing operating system
-- not Windows NT, not IBM's OS/2, nor Linux -- though in some cases there
may be upgrades to allow FAT32 to work. (Microsoft says that Windows
NT won't support FAT32 until version 5.0; conversely, OSR2 still won't
support the NT File System, which has the same advantage on NT that FAT32
provides on OSR2.) A FAT32 partition can't be read by
previous versions of MS-DOS, either, so Microsoft has removed the
"multi-boot" capability that lets Windows 95 users continue to use their
existing DOS. Fortunately the vast majority of DOS applications work
fine with the DOS core of Windows 95, so you can still use older
applications either by launching the MS-DOS prompt from Windows or
pressing F8 during boot and selecting "Command prompt only" to boot
without loading the balance of Windows 95. The DOS core is now
identified as "MS-DOS 7.1." At present Microsoft doesn't
offer a way to convert existing partitions over to FAT32, though they
reportedly did have such a program for beta testers and are expected to
include this in the next Windows 95 general release, code named
"Memphis." Several utilities from other companies, such as
PowerQuest's Partition Magic (3.0 or later), can convert between FAT16 and
FAT32
Bus Mastering: One problem Windows 95 had when it
first came out was that it didn't have the right configuration files to
support the PIIX (PCI-to-ISA and IDE Accelerator) interface chip used in
the Intel 430FX "Triton" chip set, which was starting to appear in new
Pentium-based PCs at the same time. This caused quite a few
disk-related problems on those systems, and led Microsoft to add this
support in the first OEM Service Release in early 1996. OSR2 builds
on this by adding support for "bus mastering" or "direct memory access," a
technique that newer IDE drives can use to transfer data while placing a
much lower burden on the processor. This feature also works with the
newer Intel chip sets that use the PIIX3 IDE interface, so it can be used
with most Pentium systems today and nearly all Pentium Pro and Pentium II
PCs. |