Subj : MS-DOS Emulation -use To : Ky Moffet From : Barry Martin Date : Wed Jul 29 2020 09:43:00 Hi Ky! > > Back in the old days I had a Windows and if > > I started DOS then opened Windows it worked fine but if I configured it > > to start at Windows and shell to DOS would in short time lock up. Had > > others check and they didn't find a problem with the hardware nor > > software. (Guess that was the start of my annoyance with Windows.) > KM> Huh. That's very strange, but I'd guess when it went direct to > KM> Windows, the underlying DOS memory manager was not getting loaded > KM> correctly. Or the config options were different; as I vaguely > KM> recall Win3.1 used different config options for its DOS shell. > Something like that. I did have at least one person take a look and > everything appeared correct. Oh well, just loaded DOS first, then > Windows when I needed it. KM> If I had to bet, I'd be looking at the FILES= statement in KM> CONFIG.SYS -- due to some cranks left over from the MSDOS4.x era, KM> some programs, and therefore Win3.1x itself, needed them set to KM> some ridiculously high number. That would almost make sense: here it seemed as if a buffer/holding area of some sort was being overloaded/overfilled as always worked for a little while and then stopped. The amount of time varied: sometimes almost immediately to a few minutes. Would be nice to be able to go back and check. KM> I remember this specifically KM> because DRDOS Did Things Differently there, and MSOffice 4.0 KM> would not run, and Windows was a little goofy in some other way KM> I've forgotten. So I called Microsoft, and was told to set FILES KM> and HANDLES to some absurdly high numbers... and then suddenly KM> all was well. (And Windows never, ever crashed again, nor even KM> misbehaved in any noteworthy way. Seven years without a single KM> crash!) Seven days is considered a long time!! KM> You may note a common theme here... the problem was that DOS4.x KM> didn't close files properly on disk, and apparently these KM> programs compensated, which was disagreeable to other DOS KM> versions (and thereby caused the very files-left-open problem it KM> was supposed to prevent). One fix for a problem creates a problem which needs to be fixed elsewhere. Which sort of makes points for having a base operating system and seperate applications/utilites as opposed to having those applications and utilities built into the OS. Seems like separate and independent would be easier to correct without screwing up something else. (Still a possibilty, just less so.) > KM> I recall having some rather strange config.sys and autoexec.bat > KM> bits to deal with something like this, then again I was using > KM> DRDOS underneath, and while it had more functions, it also had > KM> more cranks compared to MSDOS. > The 'we have good news and we have bad news' thing. I think I had tried > DRDOS but decided it would be best for me to stick with the 'mainstream' > stuff packed with the computers we were selling at the store and I could > (and did) provide some customer support. KM> Yeah, I wound up using it because the person who got me started KM> on this stuff was a DRDOS enthusiast, but fact was it wasn't KM> worth the trouble, with rare exceptions -- frex, you could KM> multiboot different species of DOS... tho what it actually did KM> was shell to the next DOS, not a true multiboot. (At one point I KM> had a very silly setup of three different DOSs on the same KM> system, that chain-booted to the one you wanted.) Something like when I got started with Linux. The utility I was using at the time for recording TV was MythDora, which is based on Fedora. ....Hmm: so why did I go Ubuntu instead of Fedora?? KM> DRDOS had a DPMI memory manager, which was great for Windows, but KM> caused conflicts with stuff like DOOM that had its own DPMI KM> manager... so needed a boot option to set up memory differently KM> for that. Yup: two utilities trying to do the same job at the same time isn't going to work! KM> And DRDOS's performance was (per actual test) 20% slower than KM> MSDOS6. So after the Win3.1 system with DRDOS7 was finally KM> retired, I never messed with it again., Nowadays when I use DOS, KM> by preference it's MSDOS7 from Win98 (with the 8.0 mouse driver). KM> Best performance and as bug-free as anything gets. FreeDOS is KM> okay but I seem to run into more holes and stuff that doesn't KM> work as expected. I'll admit to not really needing to return to the Old Stuff, mainly because nothing I'm using needs it, though some does use NonCurrent Stuff! Glad I learned the more or less bare bones MS-DOS and early Windows: great for troubleshooting as I sort of understand what is happening. KM> Geez, look what happens when you stir the ancient sludge in the KM> sewers of Ky's brain... So there was this article about how the Thames River was London's sewer and during droughts..... ¯ ® ¯ BarryMartin3@ ® ¯ @MyMetronet.NET ® ¯ ® ¯ (Humans know what ® ¯ to remove.) ® .... Shouldn't you be doing something productive? --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.47 þ wcECHO 4.2 ÷ ILink: The Safe BBS þ Bettendorf, IA --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .