Mail Archives: opendos/2000/10/29/20:50:14
On Sun, 29 Oct 2000, Bob Jonkman wrote (excerpted here and there):
> Is this your only computer?
Uh, well, no. Buried in the closet and a drawer I still have a
Kaypro 4 (CP/M), a Radio Shack Model 100, and a Zeos PocketPC (80C88,
MS-DOS 5 in ROM, no disk drives, but I scrambled one of the memory
cards a bit back).
> If you have an old clunker ("Vintage
> PC") lying about you could try an installation of DR-DOS on it to see
> how it goes, and get yourself some experience in partition management
> before trying to add a DR-DOS partition to your Windows box.
More to the point, on a table gathering dust, I have a Tandy 2500
SX/20, one of the last machines Tandy sold under their own label. It
is a 386sx/20Mhz with 5MB memory (non-expandable). I ran MS-DOS 5 on
it, and it gave me very good service. I was still using it until a
little over a year ago.
It came with an original 85MB HD on it. I bought (and paid for the
installation of) a second HD and managed to use DOS's FDISK to create
two partitions on it as D: and E:. So I did accomplish at least that
much. If I were to try to use Partition Magic, I might have to do a
lot of fiddling around, as the old machine has no CD-ROM drive.
However, your suggestion of experimenting on it is an excellent one.
Thank you. (I live in a small apartment with two cats, so I would have
to scrounge up some room and vacuum the cat hair to use it. :) )
> You need to make a risk analysis -- is the extra functionality of DR-
> DOS worth the risk of damaging the stuff on the computer? If the
> risk outweighs the benefits then hire someone to do it for you --
> that is, if the benefits outweigh the cost of hiring someone to do
> the work...
Again, good advice. Thanks. (Although I'm not sure just where I
would hire somebody to do it for me. :) )
> > First I think I need to get a new modem, as what came with my box
> > was apparently one of those cheesy "Winmodems." (BeOS would not
> > use it, and somebody on a BeOS list called it a Winmodem.)
>
> Some WinModem manufactures (USR, aka 3Com) have come to realize that
> Open Source is where it's at, and are releasing the programming specs
> for the WinModems to the Open Source community.
If I recall correctly (I might not), US Robotics is the only such
modem that BeOS will use right out of the package. When I booted a
trial version of BeOS, it *recognized* that I had such-and-such a modem
installed in this-or-that location, but BeOS refused to use it.
> > But beyond that, I do not want to play with the computer as an
> > end in itself.
>
> Nothing wrong with that. But _some_ of us do!
And I strongly defend your right to do so. In fact, I have enjoyed
some of the historical posts here.
--
Regards,
Paul mailto:bartlett AT smart DOT net
..........................................................
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Keyserver (0xF383C8F9) or WWW for PGP public key
Home Page: http://www.smart.net/~bartlett
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