OS/2 eZine - The Best OS/2 Reading Anywhere!

June 16, 2002

Robert Basler is the president of Aurora Systems, Inc. and has been a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day. He spends what free time he can manage travelling the world. Photo was taken at Franz Josef glacier, New Zealand.

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From The Editor

A JFS Disaster

After reading the glowing performance reviews of JFS, I finally gave JFS a try this month. I happily carved out a nice big partition for it, installed all my apps and data on it, and was ready to go. Everything seemed good until a mere 8 days later when on a hot day, the system apparently overheated. The system was very unhappy. Typing characters on the keyboard resulted in the wrong letters on the screen, and the hard drive drivers were going "beep" about every ten seconds. I pushed reset - it wouldn't even boot. I dug out my boot CD, fired up the system again, and found that the HPFS boot drive had moved a few files in the OS2 directory (like OS2.INI and OS2SYS.INI) to FOUND0 which certainly explained why it wouldn't boot. After I moved those back, it worked fine again.

The JFS volume wasn't so lucky. JFS CHKDSK ran during the boot and told me that the superblock was corrupt, that the copy of the superblock was corrupt, that the copy of the copy of the superblock was corrupt, and that CHKDSK was giving up. What?!? Giving up? Where's my files? A little hunting on the internet told me that the only recovery from the error message I was getting was a fresh format. So much for the vaunted journalling system.

Interestingly enough, I have found that for directory searching, like when my email program populates a listbox of all my mail, that HPFS is very noticeably faster. 3 to 4 times by my eye.

I've lost just one file with HPFS in all the time I've used it. In the end, all I really lost was a few emails and my confidence in JFS. Most disappointing.

Mozilla 1.0

Mozilla 1.0 has finally been released. They've fixed a number of issues I'd had with the release candidates such as adding a .exe suffix to .zip file names (very annoying) and they've made it so that OS/2 will shut down when Mozilla is running. I've been running it exclusively since I installed it. For additional comments, look at my last month's From the Editor column.

Scitech Display Doctor Pro

I bought my copy of Scitech's Display Doctor Pro this month. I recently upgraded to a GeForce 4 Ti video card. With the plain VBE driver it was painfully slow and it didn't work at all with the GenGradd drivers, so without Scitech, I would be running in VGA mode. Last night, Scitech released the new Pro RC-1 build, I downloaded and installed it, and lo and behold, my video is fast once again. I had been using SDD Special Edition, but I thought that since these guys are single-handedly maintaining support for new video cards and even though IBM is paying them, I want to make sure they continue making OS/2 drivers. So if you are running SDD SE, think about getting the Pro version - you'll probably like the extra features.

This Issue

Robert Basler looks at a neat screen saver and a couple of job schedulers, John Bijnens looks at a system monitor I need to install, Isaac Leung looks at a mathematical analysis tool, James Cannon fills a request for additional information on networking once install is over, Doug Clark shares some experiences writing Netscape plugins, and James Cannon is back with some more desktop art.

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