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| Author |
Message |
bad
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DOS 5.0 - a look back
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Jul 28 07:54 UTC 1991 |
Now that DOS 5.0's been around for a few months, has anyone found
any hidden jewels in it?
How about hidden pitfalls?
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| 66 responses total. |
mju
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response 1 of 66:
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Jul 28 15:58 UTC 1991 |
A lot of people who had a Unix partition on their hard drive found that
the DOS 5.0 upgrade trashed it. I didn't have any problems, but that's
probably because I installed DOS before I installed Unix.
One thing I'd have liked to see in DOS 5.0 is a version of 4DOS, instead
of that yucky COMMAND.COM that Microsloshed seems to like so much. (Hey,
I know why they haven't bundled 4DOS with DOS -- if MS makes the command-
line interface difficult to use, more people will use Windows! Hmm...)
Norton seems to have picked up on this, though -- I hear that Norton 6.0
has a version of 4DOS, called NDOS, bundled with it.
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ric
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response 2 of 66:
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Jul 29 01:26 UTC 1991 |
Microsoft needs to get their things in order. A lot of folk had problems
with Dos 4.1 when simply putting it onto a hard drive formatted under 3.3.
I lost a lot of stuff on my hard drive when I installed 4.1 and immediately
began having lots of problems. Once I reformatted and used 4.1, it worked
fine.
I haven't seen/used 5.0 as I haven't had an IBM since last summer.
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mcnally
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response 3 of 66:
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Jul 29 05:53 UTC 1991 |
Microsoft has handled the last two major OS upgrades in a particularly
graceless fashion. Most people I knew just stuck with MS-DOS 3.3 rather
than upgrade to 4.x
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danr
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response 4 of 66:
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Jul 29 11:47 UTC 1991 |
They may not have handled it most gracefully, but the latest seems to
be a smashing success, judging by sales. There are always going to be
problems with an initial release of a software product meant to run on
so many different machines. What's important is how gracefully they handle
these problems.
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mcnally
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response 5 of 66:
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Jul 29 22:54 UTC 1991 |
This being Microsoft, I expect major f*ckups..
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steve
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response 6 of 66:
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Jul 31 04:47 UTC 1991 |
I think this time they did it right (mostly). Using 5.0, and 386MAX,
I have 623K free for conventional programs. The only odd thing I have
bumped into is in QuickBasic (I know, I know, stop and clean up the floor)
if I bring up a shell, and then run TCOM (Glen Roberts rather decent
terminal proggram), I can't do anything when exiting TCOM. Memory is
trashed, and I can't run anything. I don't think this happened on DOS 4.
So while DOS 5 isn't great, and probably never could be, it seems
an improvemant, if only for the fact that it isn't as corpulent as 4 was.
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danr
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response 7 of 66:
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Aug 18 21:04 UTC 1991 |
Anyone having problems with 5.0 and TELIX? I put the status line at the
bottom, and with DOS 5.0 it seems to get written over ocassionally.
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jep
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response 8 of 66:
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Aug 24 02:18 UTC 1991 |
I haven't had any problems like that.
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jeffk
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response 9 of 66:
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May 25 15:17 UTC 1992 |
Got an interesting problem on my father-in-law's machine. Came up recently
after he upgraded to DOS 5.0. In his CHKDSK listing he's got about 67MB
free on the disk. This is about normal. The DIR listing reports at the bottom
that there is only 20MB free. VERY STRANGE. He's got a Packard-Bell 25MHz
SX machine that otherwise seems to run everything hunky-dory. Any thoughts?
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gunge
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response 10 of 66:
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Jul 29 21:06 UTC 1992 |
Does anyone know if there is a limit to the amount of extended memory
that HIMEM.SYS can handle? I have a 486 with 32MB of RAM, but HIMEM
only uses about 16MB for XMS and the remaining 16MB is unusable. Is
there any way to get all 32MB into XMS?
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jeffk
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response 11 of 66:
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Jul 30 03:48 UTC 1992 |
Finally found the problem on the father-in-law's machine. Turned out to be
a glitch in SMARTCAN or TRASHCAN from Norton Desktop for Windows. In upgrading
norton never purged the old files and the new program never recognized the
old deleted files -- to the tune of 20 megs.
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tsty
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response 12 of 66:
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Aug 3 18:12 UTC 1992 |
The arithmetic would indicate that there is still another 47Meg lurking
around onthat HD. Am I reading #9 and #11 correctly?
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jeffk
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response 13 of 66:
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Aug 6 03:27 UTC 1992 |
yea, I know. It's OK now, and I don't know why. I've seen strange stuff,
but never like that before.
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mwg
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response 14 of 66:
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Aug 27 01:28 UTC 1992 |
Re#10: That sounds odd, since I thought that XMS was more a memory usage
registry and not an actual manager. What are you doing that cannot reach
the extra memory? Have you considered using QEMM-386 instead? I *think* it
tops out at 64MB.
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jeffk
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response 15 of 66:
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Aug 27 03:07 UTC 1992 |
First of all, I think 486's top out at 32MB, not 64MB -- please correct me
if I'm wrong.
If you're really serious about *efficiently* using XMS, use QEMM386 or 386/Max
or something OTHER than HIMEM.SYS. HIMEM.SYS is a memory pig and generally
behaves badly with many systems and software configurations. QEMM is much
more forgiving and will report errors if they happen, not just a freeze-up,
like HIMEM.SYS. We are developing in Protected mode where I work and we
DO have problems with HIMEM and not with QEMM. QEMM seems to be much more
stable. Look at it this way: Do you trust Microsoft to do something right?
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mju
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response 16 of 66:
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Aug 27 04:37 UTC 1992 |
Um, I saw a 486DX2/50 machine with 64MB of memory in it just the other
day, so I'm sure the 486 doesn't "top out" at 32MB. Many motherboards
do, but that has nothing to do with the chip itself, which has a VM
address space of 2^32, or 4GB.
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meg
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response 17 of 66:
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Aug 27 04:41 UTC 1992 |
Hey, I saw one too, imagine that...
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cybrgirl
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response 18 of 66:
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Sep 26 20:04 UTC 1995 |
I have a 486DX4/100 and it has 128MB of RAM.
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scg
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response 19 of 66:
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Sep 27 05:44 UTC 1995 |
That just goes to show how old this item is. Not long before the last
responses in this item, I got what was considered to be a perfectly adequate
computer -- a 386sx-25 with two megs or RAM. Times certainly have changed.
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n8nxf
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response 20 of 66:
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Sep 27 14:09 UTC 1995 |
I have one of those too! Except with 4M.
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ajax
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response 21 of 66:
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Sep 27 14:49 UTC 1995 |
Re 18, what do you do with all that memory? That's even more than
Windows NT requires!!
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scg
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response 22 of 66:
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Sep 28 05:21 UTC 1995 |
I've known people who have used that kind of memory for intensive video stuff.
That amount of memory could also be used to run a loaded conferencing system,
like Grex. I certainly have no need for that amount of memory, but I imagine
that in a few years I will probably reread this and have trouble imagining
that I ever could have thought that was a lot.
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mjh16886
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response 23 of 66:
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Sep 17 04:47 UTC 2000 |
I'm curious. Do some people still use those old operating systems these day
or is everyone buying up the media hype and getting Winbloat Me from our
favorite software monopoly? Or perhaps they're like me and made the switch
to Linux
(Dammit Bill the Penguin means business!)
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scg
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response 24 of 66:
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Sep 17 06:46 UTC 2000 |
I'm using NT 4 at the moment, since it's what was supplied by the corporate
IS department on my notebook, and I don't have a working modem in my own
desktop machine. It runs Linux, but hasn't been unpacked since I moved. I'll
porbably unpack it once my DSL line gets installed.
So in 1995 I said I had no need for 128 MB of memory, but that in a few years
that comment would seem strange. I'm currently using a notebook that I think
has 128 MB of memory, if not 256 MB. At my previous job, I had a computer
on my desk with 256 MB of memory, and made reasonably good use of it.
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