Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 17:02:46 +1200 From: physmsa AT cantua DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz (Mr M S Aitchison) Subject: OpenDOS and Win95 To: opendos-support AT delorie DOT com Message-id: <199707220502.RAA13496@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> Precedence: bulk OpenDOS can get along very well with Win95, but don't expect much out of MS's boot managers. I use Linux or OS/2 boot managers, and am working on a new system that quickly boots a bare-bones OpenDOS and runs a highly configurable menu before booting another operating system (or carrying on and booting DOS). By the way, two people here have discovered Win95 doesn't work with their data collection system and asked me to replace Win95 with OpenDOS recently. If OpenDOS can be popular now, while it is still buggy, imagine what it can do when the wrinkles are ironed out! > First of all, I am very sorry to hear that the taskmgr.exe is a bad joke. I don't think it is all that bad, but the mixture of DPMI and TASKMGR and networking is a pretty sure way to have something crash in a nasty way. These are the hints I've picked up over time... some might not really make a difference but are a good idea to try first if anything is unstable... 1. DO NOT loadhigh mouse drivers. Sometimes this leads to random crashes (that don't immediately look like mouse problems). This might only apply to sime drivers, but it is the first thing I change. 2. I haven't had the troubles others have had with NWCDEX, but if there are problems try replacing it with MSCDEX. 3. I'm not sure about this, but it seems that when loading the ODI network drivers, don't loadhigh LSL nor the MLID (NE2000 or E935 or whatever actually talks to the card); keep them low but load IPXODI and what comes after it high. What do others do? 4. I tend to load NWCACHE last, with a small buffer, and don't use EMS. 5. Make absolutely sure that network cards that use upper memory (e.g. SMC8000's) don't get anything mapped over their RAM area by EMM386. The setup program doesn't always leave a memory hole because the RAM area on the card might not be enabled at the time, and can be relocated on some cards by another operating system. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Aitchison, Physics & Astronomy \_ Phone : +64 3 3642-947 a.h. 3371-225 University of Canterbury, (/' Callsign: ZL3TQE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------