12/96 News: Win95 Gets Touched Up for '97
By James E. Powell
You might not know it right away, but the Windows 95 you get when
you buy a new PC today is not the Windows 95 that shipped in August
'95. There have been tweaks all along, but now Microsoft has prepared
a new OEM Service Release.
Some of the new features in OSR 2, as it's been dubbed, will be
available only on new systems, which are more likely to include
the hardware needed to use them. Others can be downloaded from
the company's Web site. Those drivers not available for download
directly from Microsoft will likely be included with new hardware
peripherals and on the specific vendors' Web sites.
Exclusively available on new machines will be the new FAT32 file
system for handling hard disks up to 2 terabytes, plus updates
to the Format, ScanDisk, FDISK and defrag utilities to support
FAT32 (no updates to DriveSpace, however). Power management improvements
include wake-on-ring for modems and drive spin-down. OSR 2 has
drivers for 120MB Floptical disk drives, removable IDE media and
Iomega Zip drives, as well as support for lower-voltage PCMCIA
cards. Also unique to new systems will be support for Intel Pentium
MMX, Personal Web Services (for publishing and hosting HTML pages
over the Internet or an intranet), and drivers for NDIS 4.0 network
interface cards.
OSR 2 also bundles Web-related products, including Internet Explorer
3.0, the Internet Connection Wizard (for simplified Web setup),
NetMeeting, and Internet Mail and News, all currently available
for download. New and existing users will benefit from Dial-Up
Networking improvements like scripting, support for VoiceView
and AT+V modems (to allow switched voice and data transmission),
support for IRDA (infrared) 2.0-compliant devices, and a host
of performance improvements (and bug fixes) to Microsoft Network,
Microsoft Fax and OLE components.
All the features in this service release will also be incorporated
into Win95's next formal upgrade, currently code- named Memphis,
which is scheduled for beta testing in early 1997.