I have a 1000 MHz P3 overclocked to 1050 Mhz CPU, 512 Mb SDR-133 RAM(one stick), 140 Gb on 2 HDDs(20 & 120), 128 Mb DDR nVidia GeForce 4 Video with TV out, and Creative Sound Blaster 128. I run Win2K, but I am interested in OS/2. What can it NOT run?
What progs can be run (16 bit OS/2, 16 bit DOS, 32 bit OS/2, 32 bit WIN)?
Can it run decent games (I.E. Unreal tournament 2003 or Counter-strike)?
Norton Antivirus/Firewall?
What about drivers?
Is there registry for certain Win32 apps?
Internet?
Graphics?
Video (Movies, etc)?
MP3's? (I got 7 gigs of high-quality music)
Benchmark results?
MSN?
Office-type of progs?
NTFS supported?
Any other input?
Thanks for any support
feel free to e-mail at
<dsolom3@rin.ru>

Windows apps are out (the ones that access higher memory address spaces), at least for me they are unless using a windows emulator or project odin. Search for it to get an idea.

MP3, yup, got 12 gb of 'em
videos, get WarpVision
CD Burning, get Audio CD Creator
Windows games will not work in OS/2. Check out odin to see if they got some of them to work.
NTFS, yeah, but it is inferior to HPFS and JFS (eCS or WSeB). JFS is a journaling file system and doesn't need to be defragged and can span multiple disks without rebooting. HPFS doesn't get fragmented either and is faster than NTFS, even on IDE drives. newer SCSI drives will blow it out of the water though.
StarOffice and another office suite.
Get SNAP Graphics, and you can use your TV out.
TV Tuners are supported in OS/2, got it to work easily.
Sound card, you may need to look for drivers.
Email: PMMail/2
Internet: Mozilla (www.mozilla.org), similar to firebird in windows
VNC is available also
No need for viruses as you are off the MS OS Kernel and apps. I haven't had one for OS/2 for 10 yrs, no need.

Good place for many of these apps: http://hobbes.nmsu.edu

or

http://www.os2world.com
http://www.os2ezine.com
http://www.os2voice.org

Things I miss from windows world:

VS.NET2003 (I develop and would like to continue to practice)
MS Net meeting...or video conference

I don't miss gaming as I got a PS/2 on the net.

win2k? Absurdly bloated (xp is even worse),relies on the insane registry,cant even run without a gui which anyway does`nt nearly match up to the power of OS/2 PM. Of course it is ultimately based on OS/2, as can be observed by gdi32.dll (rumoured to be based directly on OS/2 gpi) and by the fact that nt Was originally intended primarily to run OS/2 apps. microsloth have ruined its OS/2 legacy!. having said that, especially for personal use, a good hex editor and disassembler,along with symbol files can be very useful in patching out many of its more annoying features and for me nt-based windoze at least does`nt crash endlessly because it`s not Dos-based (unless you patch it in the wrong place, of course). I never feel much urge to patch os/2 because, while obviously not perfect, it`s design basically makes more sense than windoze. Please use any version of windoze only if you really need to, otherwise Warp, even Dos, or Linux, so many advantages if you think about it.

Bloated? That was a good excuse back in the days of 120meg hard drives. No such thing today with 100+ gig hard drives standard on todays computers.

W2K and XP might have some security problems, but it's by far the most user freindly OS out there. If you keep your W2K/XP OS updated, you should have no problems.

I keep a 30+ million dollar a year business up with MS products and 90% of the apps that we need to do business are MS. It would cost us more to go with Linux/Unix because we would lose customers if we did. OS2 is dead. Dos is good for scripts, that it.

Technically, there is nothing wrong with MS products if you think about it. It's the hackers/criminals fault for using it as their own personal bank account and playground. Would you hold Pella Windows responsible for items stolen in your house if a criminal broke the window to gain access? I don't think so.

IN my opinion, the previous poster is partly correct. In the business world today, MS is the least expensive and most supported way to go. I don't feel it is the best and certainly it is not anywhere near secure and probably never will be. It IS MS's fault because their primary focus has been features and interoperability between *THEIR* apps and not the security of the OS. If you could see a list of just the flaws that give an attacker full access to your pc/network, it would freak you out. The only way to properly secure a windows based network is to have layer upon layer of security measures. Even with multiple layers of security (which is needed for all networks), I am afraid because I know the nature of the exploitations. A good hacker will get code into your network either by an email or a buffer overrun in MS's seriously flawed Web Browser or messaging products, or other possibly undiscovered flaws in the OS. The code she injects will generate traffic which will be virtually indistinguishable from legitimate traffic. So the best firewall in the world won't be able to distinguish it from normal outgoing web traffic. A proxy server in this case helps as does serious firewall rules, but not completely. Once she gets her initial code in place, it's only a matter of time until she is grabbing your keystrokes and sniffing your network. Best defense here is a very diligent network security admin that analyzes all traffic incoming and outgoing and to disallow all attachments to messages. Obviously keeping the latest service pack is required. Even doing this, there are still ways to get in.

It is unfortunate that there are very few companies supporting OS/2 these days, but that is mostly IBM's fault. Their greed and stubbornness killed the OS for consumers. Now they even charge their customers for fixpacks and the like. And there is no support for their developers. That is where MS really shines as they treat their developers like kings. I really like OS/2 and it's interface. It is fun to work with and can be enhanced substantially. But it is really hardware dependant and can run unstably on certain hardware configurations. The exception might be eComstation which is a version of OS/2 that is supported and sold by a third party.

I've worked professionally as a developer on microsoft based networks and have written lots of code for ms platforms, and even have 6 MS Certifications but I would rather use OS/2 as my primary OS if I were able to run all of my MS apps on it and it had vendor and developer support. I am looking to ODIN for this but am afraid it's not going to get done as it looks like people have lost interest. I think a better approach is to try and get a 32bit windows session going using an actual licensed windows98 or win2k codebase.

I like Linux but don't like the idea of 30,000 script kiddies running around with rootkits and tools to exploit certain versions of the OS. Again, there are lots of things you can do to help prevent this.

So I guess I would have to advise the original poster to stick with MS. It looks like he is a gamer. If you like to tinker and an occasional challange, you might experiment with OS/2 on a second drive or something. I personally use it as a firewall/router on my office network and play with it at home. There still is quite a bit of open source and freeware available for it. And if you are into Java development, it has good built in support.

And to the previous poster: I would hold pella responsible if their windows were slick and handsome, but their locks didn't latch properly or had a defect that would let the theif into my house and they were not concentrating on making their locks secure. I think most courts of law would reach the same conclusion.

Thanks guys
These are of really great help. I'll keep the win2K and get to know the OS/2 for now.