Subject: Re: Upgrade & Cross-Platform
From: Ted Stethem <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 23:10:06 -0800

Thanks to everybody that responded to my questions about things to look 
out for upgrading and crossing platforms from Amiga to PC.
  I installed Rev.C Intel under Windows 95. I am sitting at my desk 
barefooted (yep, blew my socks off!). In the box was a little, poorly 
copied Read Me First instruction with notes about configuring plug-ins, 
undocumented features and Errata. It said to read the ReadMe.txt first 
and that had some updates about installing under Win95. Maybe the 
following will be of interest to some people here (from the ReadMe file):

"***THIS REVISION OF LIGHTWAVE HAS BEEN OPTIMIZED FOR WINDOWS 95. Render
speeds under Win95 should now be within 10% of Windows NT. With this
optimization, WinNT also gained a 10-15% speed increase.***

The Win32s extension is NOT required with Windows 95. Win32s is a 32 bit
extension for standard Windows3.1. Installing the Win32s extension under
Win95 WILL cause operating system errors."

  Now, this first statement really piqued my curiosity.  Would anybody 
running under Intel WinNT be willing to post a render time for one of the 
scenes in the examples or tutorials so I could compare (with clock speed 
and memory configuration)? Also, I only have 16 megs RAM at this point (I 
know, woefully inadequate) and in the empty scene requestor, it says I 
have 4.78 Megs RAM and 519 Megs fil or something like that. Since I 
haven't gotten around to reading the manual in detail yet, I would assume 
the 519 Megs fil refers to virtual memory but I loaded the Outworld 
example scene (Bladerunner clone), which said I had 0 RAM left
and it didn't appear to revert to disk swapping. Does the Intel version
automatically start swapping to virtual disk when it runs out of RAM?
  I don't know about other people but I called Newtek first before 
getting the upgrade, and I talked to a very nice, knowledgeable lady in 
sales, who gave me the name of a local authorized dealer, the dealer 
turned out to be a really dynamite guy who isn't really up on Lightwave 
but is doing pretty well supporting Flyer and Toaster installations all 
over the state, who took my order on the basis of my name (not even a 
credit card number), and got delivery from NewTek in 3 days.  Am I just 
lucky or what? I guess the only bad thing was the dealer was really 
steamed, since he is still mainly with the Amiga and the Flyer, that the 
Intel version of LW 4.0 standalone came with such incredibly impressive 
manuals. He said his Toaster version came in with what virtually amounted 
to a small volume of what looked like photo-copied 8 1/2 x 11 sheets. I 
didn't pay much attention since I was drooling over the beautiful glossy 
pages of the User Guide and trying to keep my eyeballs in my sockets over 
the full color plates of gorgeous renders in the center of the manual. Oh 
well, enuff gripin' for now!