[plug] WINE and performance, WINprinters

[Leon Brooks]

Bret Busby wrote:
> I have been running MSOffice 97 on top of Win98, on a Cyrix P150+ with 32MB
> of EDO RAM. The speed has been acceptable (but not the crashes).

> As a comparison, would I be able to run this, or, similar Win9x applications
> on WinE, without an appreciable drop in performance? (Once I sort out my
> hard drive situation, I intend to switch to Star Office.)

Probably. Let's try it and see, shall we? (-:

> If WinE can run on a configuration like this, without an appreciable drop in
> performance, then it will have it over Win2000, on the basis of the concept
> that M$ push; TCO - total cost of ownership. Many people, like me, have
> cheap systems like this; and, to upgrade them to systems that would run Win
> NT comfortably, would require upgrading the hardware, which means that the
> conversion cost would be even greater. And, Win2000 is just WinNT5, so it
> would require at least the same resources as WinNT 4.

Agree.

> One consideration, regarding WinE; will it handle GDI printers, that only
> run on Win3x and Win9x? I have an NEC SS660+ (belongs to an organisation),
> which has drivers only for Win3x and Win9x (not for WinNT!). Similarly, an
> HP Scanjet 5100C (Win9x drivers only, and TextBridge - Win98 only). Would
> the drivers run on WinE?

Pity about the printer. The scanjet will run fine under SANE - and you
can _share_ it over the network ("Ooooh" from peanut galley) - and there
are Linux OCR programs. I don't know whether a TWAIN front-end exists
for SANE under WINE but it would be a worthy ambition. Also, forget
WinModems; many "PCI modems" are really WinModems, so don't buy one.
They usually also stuff up badly under WIn98, but that's another story.

-- 
customer: "I have Windows 95 on my computer."
tech: "Yes."
customer: "My computer isn't working right."
tech: "Yes. You already told me that."