From: "Nathan Gregory" <p00211@psilink.com>
Subject: Upgrading to Windows NT
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I'd like to appeal to the net's NT wizards for a bit of advice.

First a general description of the machine as follows:
 Motherboard: Utron 33 mhz Opti chipset, 20 meg memory, 256kb cache
      (soon I hope to drop a DX2 chip into it)
 Fahrenheit 1280 video (1 meg, 1024x768x256)
 ProAudio Spectrum 16 sound board
 primary disk = Connor CP30174 on a caching IDE controller
 secondary disk = Conner CP30174 as slave on same controller
 tertiary disk = Fujitsu ??? 650 meg on Superstore ESDI controller
 planned future disks include SCSI HD and CD ROM on PAS16 SCSI port
 Tape drive is a Colorado Jumbo 250 on the Floppy controller
  future tape drive may be a DAT on the SCSI interface.
 Other hardware includes modem/fax, serial ports, and a teletext board
 (ugly dos software drives the latter)

Applications used include normal windows stuff (excel, word, Quicken
and Turbo Pascal/Windows) but the important stuff is my Audio
work environment which includes Turtle beach Wave for Windows, MCS Stereo,
and other misc stuff for dinking around with audio files.  Also I use
Stacker on the primary drive, HP Newwave (for my wife's use, and she 
won't let me get rid of it!), and a product called Infinite Disk from 
Chili Pepper Software for hierarchical storage management of my seldom 
used offline files.  

I plan to upgrade to NT, when it becomes a released product.  I was stongly
tempted to become a beta user early on, but I don't have time to mess around
with the hassles of beta software.  I expect to buy it, tear off the 
shrink wrap, and use it without hassle (I know, unrealistic, but I can
hope can't I, after all, I have work to do).

The advice I want concerns the state of NT regarding device drivers, and 
hardware specific stuff in general.  How smoothly can I expect the 
upgrade to go?  Can I expect support for all my stuff, or do I
still need to scramble around downloading drivers (PAS?, Orchid?, Colorado?) 
from some bbs, etc.  What steps should I take to ensure the installation
goes smoothly.  Note that I want to nuke dos totally from the system.  I'm
allergic to command lines!  I plan to run a "pure" NT system.  Also, will 
NT communicate with the workgroups lan?  What about stacker?  I currently 
have stacker on the first disk drive.  Without Stacker, and the Infinite 
Disk product, I will have great difficulty fitting everything I have on the 
system (It's cramped now).

I realize Stacker will be incompatible with NT, but will there be an NT 
version?  Or will NT support compression a la Dos 6?  I know Infinite Disk
will be incompatible with NT, but will they offer (or does anybody else)
a comparable product for NT and at what cost?  (perhaps I need to ask 
Chili Pepper that question)  I can live without ID if I have to, but I'd
rather not.  Will NT run my DOS apps (the teletext board mainly) without
DOS on the system?  What do I need to keep around?

Any feedback or advice (including "forget NT" with good reasons) is much
appreciated.  My only significant reason for moving to NT is I need a better
multitasking environment than Windows (among other reasons, WAVE locks up
the machine for hours and hours doing DSP processing on large audio files),
and I want better lan support than I now have (Internet access, etc).  Maybe
there are better solutions than NT and if so, I would appreciate hearing 
about them (OS/2?  What's it's status these days?)

Pls respond by email and if there is interest I'll summarize for the net.

Thanks,
Nathan Gregory
p00211@psilink.com

