From: support@qdeck.com (Technical Support)
Subject: Re: Desqview/X over TCP/IP: how reliable? how is it implemented?
Organization: Quarterdeck Office Systems, Santa Monica CA
Lines: 46

In article <C6BFLB.KEM@cs.columbia.edu> ethan@cs.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:
>
>	Three q's:
>
>1) is it reliable?

I use it all day every day (maintaining our ftp site and answering mail
via support@qdeck.com), and I can honestly say that in the last few
months I've never had my machine go down due to any sort of tcpip network
manager instability. (Of course, I've crashed my machine quite a few times
on purpose, during beta testing and that sort of thing, but the tcpip
portion is quite stable...)

However, keep in mind that DVX and the network managers are only going
to be as stable as the software they sit on top of (so if your underlying
network kernel is flakey, you can't expect DVX to be terribly stable...)

>2) how does it send the information from a MS Windows app over
>the X11 protocol? Does it just draw everything as graphics into
>one window, or does it use multiple windows and essentially work
>more cleverly?

It just goes as a window that has graphics drawn into it. (To vastly
over-simplify what goes on, we just take the windows graphics API calls,
and translate them directly to X-protocol; unfortunately, windows was
not really written to be network-aware, so sometimes we see a speed
penalty when an app does something stupid, like sending a big white bitmap
to erase something rather than just drawing a white box; fortunately,
that sort of thing is rare...)

>3) If I want to run MS Word, for example, remotely, do I have to
>run a separate copy of MS Windows remotely, and then start MS
>Word from that, or can MS Word be started remotely on its own?

You need to run MS windows, which Word then runs inside. You could run
multiple windows programs within the one WinX window, and windows has
ways to automagically start winapps when you start windows, so in practice
it's not really a major problem. I have my system set up so that I can
run WinX, which automatically starts Word Full-screen (for windows), so
I never see any part of windows but word...)

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