Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 19:07:09 -0400 (EDT) From: Paul O Bartlett To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Advanced DOS for Beginners (was: Re: How to unsubscribe) In-Reply-To: <20000708.124958.-589667.1.domanspc@juno.com> Message-ID: X-PGP-keyid: 0xF383C8F9 X-PGP-fingerprint: E62D2E2C7BCD08CB B742A93726A91532 Organization: SmartNet Private Account MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: opendos AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Sat, 8 Jul 2000, Robert W Moss wrote (small excerpt): > If noone asks for help, and noone offers any, we will never have much > traffic and many people will get disgusted and think DOS is dinosaur, > lost in time and they will go on to ngu-linux or fall back to (expletive > deleted) > gates-windows. When all the knowledge is owned by a few, the many are > deprived and wander aimlessly in search of who knows what. I suppose I am one of the many who are deprived and wandering aimlessly. :-) I have posted a time or two, but mostly I have tried to read quietly As I have posted briefly before, I really don't like Windoozy and rather liked MS-DOS (I used v5) within its limitations, so I wanted to try to learn more about some other DOS(es) that I might like. I have toyed with the notion of Linux, but I really don't have any unix administration experience, and the task seems a bit daunting. (However, I an *using* a dialed-up Linux shell account right now as my mail agent.) Unfortunately, as I have followed this newsgroup for a time, I have gotten the idea, rightly or wrongly, that to use some of the other DOSes (DR-DOS seems to be the most common), one almost has to be a hacker in the good sense. I have a P2/450MHz box with 128MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive which is currently only 715MB used, and W98 came pre-installed. But I am not a hacker, and it would be only with great trepidation that I would even try to install a DOS on this box without wiping out what I already have. (About the only thing I really use W98 _as_such_ for are Netscape and a bit of simple word processing, but I do have things installed I would like to keep, such as a lot of DOS files. Being able to run either OS would be a real boon.) On this list I read of boot sectors, dual booting, FAT32 versus FAT16, file systems, who or what can or cannot read what or whom, and various and assorted other arcana. All of this means little to me. It seems for someone like me, who wants to *use* a computer as a tool and not as an end in itself, and who does not have a lot of skill and background, that mucking about with various operating systems and whatnot simply seems to be a task beyond me, much as I dislike Windoozy and did like MS-DOS 5 up to its limitations. I don't have anybody to come in to hold my hand, so to speak. Figurativly speaking, is there any hope for a klutz like me, or am I trapped in Windowdom? Thanks for listening. -- 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