Windows 95 keeps up with users on the go
Jon Udell
When Microsoft began designing Windows 95, the handwriting was already on the wall: Portable PCs would soon begin to displace desktop systems, acting as home computers and road machines. Windows 95's Plug and Play support--with dynamically loadable and unloadable VxDs (virtual device drivers)--anticipated the needs of the user who yanks a PC off the company network, pounds out a speech on an airplane, arrives at the conference hall just in time to print it, and jacks into the company network at the end of the day from the hotel.
The best way to reach this state of perpetual motion will be to use a dockable laptop. Punch the eject button, and you trigger a flurry of activity as Windows 95 negotiates with applications to release their hold on
files and devices, and then unloads drivers. Dock the PC, and everything comes back. (Caveat: I've seen this done but haven't tried it myself.) Everyone will want to do this, but everyone doesn't have a docking station.
What does Windows 95 do for nondockable portables? On the hardware side, it handles the hot swapping of PCMCIA cards (as does OS/2 Warp), and it can monitor battery power and react to suspend/resume events. There's also a hardware profiles manager (again, a la OS/2 Warp) that can prompt you at boot-up time to choose between, say, an office configuration and a remote setup. Even with all this flexibility, though, you can still reboot more often than you like--as when you change your IP address. Windows 95 isn't as dynamic as NetWare.
Shiva helped Microsoft integrate PPP-based dial-up networking into Windows 95, and the results are impressive. From home, I can dial the office and run three protocols (IPX/SPX, NetBEUI, and TCP/IP) and two clients (Novell and Microsoft), navigating
the full panoply of resources on our network.
Negotiation of communications settings
, a problem in earlier beta versions, was smoother in the current Beta 3. Resource browsing, however, remains maddeningly slow. Microsoft says its protocols are "slow-link aware," which helps make data transfer more robust. What would also help would be improved client-side caching, so that laboriously retrieved directory listings need not be refetched.
I had to dial in to a Windows NT machine because the Windows 95 remote-access server in the previous beta version had vanished in Beta 3. It will be available separately, and that's a relief to corporate IS managers. If they were suspicious of Windows 3.11's peer networking, they'll be terrified of deploying thousands of Windows 95 systems, each of which could be a security risk.
Windows 95's mail client, now called Microsoft Exchange, uses the LAN when you're in the office and dial-up networking when you're elsewhere. A nifty remote prev
iew feature lets you scan message headers and specify which to retrieve. Users of nondockable portables will appreciate its ability to fetch messages nondestructively--that is, without altering the state of the post-office message store.
Why do that? If you operate separate home, office, and road PCs, you know that managing multiple local message stores leads to vexing synchronization problems. If you can't avoid these problems by consolidating everything into a multipurpose PC, it's handy to let multiple PCs share one post-office account without stepping on each other's toes. I used Exchange to remotely access both my Microsoft Mail and CompuServe accounts.
Mobile users will appreciate Windows 95's deferred-printing capability. You can print to a network printer when you're off-line. When you reconnect, Windows 95 finds the printer and prompts you to complete the job.
You can use the
Windows 95 Briefcase
to help synchronize files between your portable PC and a desk
top or server system. You might, for example, keep a PIM (personal information manager) data file on a server to share it with others and include it in the nightly server backups. If you drag a copy of the file to your portable's Briefcase, it can move the file back and forth for you. When you're leaving the office, a Briefcase update copies from the server to your portable. When you return with new PIM data in the Briefcase, another update effects the reverse transfer.
WHERE TO FIND
Microsoft Corp.
Redmond, WA
(800) 426-9400
(206) 882-8080
fax: (206) 936-7329
screen_link (50 Kbytes)
The Briefcase helps you manage files that sometimes live on a desktop or server machine and at other times travel with you on a portable PC.
screen_link (50 Kbytes)
Wizards make it easier to navigate the forest of dialog boxes involved in the configuration of dial-up networking. Note that "Internet" is now a supported PPP server type, which means you can establish a dial-up connection to an IP service provider as well as to the office LAN.
Jon Udell is BYTE's executive editor of new media. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
judell@bix.com
.
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